


Beautiful and Splendid Things

by Dhillarearen



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Andrew and poetry, Cyberpunk, Hoverboard AU, M/M, Neil and having friends, Nonbinary Character, Sci-Fi AU, Solarpunk, Trans Character, Trans Male Neil Josten, Unreliable Narrator, background Wymack/Abby/Bee, is Hopepunk a thing? bc that's kind of this as well, technically post-apocalypse but they got better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-18 03:36:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 37,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18112472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dhillarearen/pseuds/Dhillarearen
Summary: Hobbes hasn’t been taught in a century, but if he were, Neil Josten would agree with his view on humanity. The only good thing about living is Exy, and being a member of a professional Exy hover-racing team means that Neil doesn’t have to think about anything else.Enter Andrew Minyard.





	1. I-1

**Author's Note:**

> I’m so excited to finally share my Reverse Bang contribution! The art for this is absolutely gorgeous and can be found at the end of this work, along with the referenced poems and a short glossary.
> 
> My artist was [still-waiting-for-godot](http://still-waiting-for-godot.tumblr.com) and my beta was [demi-jos10](http://demi-jos10.tumblr.com). Thank you both with all my heart.

**_I._ **

Life has loveliness to sell,

     All beautiful and splendid things,

Blue waves whitened on a cliff,

     Soaring fire that sways and sings,

And children's faces looking up

Holding wonder like a cup.

* * *

 

Falling off a hoverboard wasn’t deadly anymore, not since the enactment of the Exy Safety Regulations Committee (subdivision, International Exy League of Operations) and its accompanying constitution of restrictions. It still hurt like a bitch and a motherfucker. The seams between the glowing blue tiles of the hovertrack dug red lines into Neil’s knees and elbows as he stopped moving, making his hair stand up with the electric shock. He groaned.  
  
“Get back up, Josten!” Coach Wymack yelled. Neil tugged on the stubbornly loose Velcro strap of his glove and thudded wearily after his wayward board, which had shot down the track in his absence a good fifteen meters. His friction armor—friccer, as it had been dubbed in irreverent colloquialism—glowed in a red haze around him. Neil hit the powerpack in the middle of his chest to make it calm down and dragged himself back onto his board. His legs and feet tingled with electric feedback. Neil stamped them impatiently on the bumpy rubber surface of his board, feeling the resistance in his shoes as they picked up the magnets under the thin top layer, and angled himself back to the starting line.  
  
“You’ll get it!” Dan called encouragingly from the fence. Her boots dangled from her hand, dark and blade-less. Wymack was running board drills, so the rest of his athletes had cleared off the track to give Neil, Kevin, and Matt the space to fuck up. Besides the three boardists they had two on blades—Dan and Allison—and Renee and Aaron on cycles. Allison had not been pleased when Neil had been signed six months ago.  
  
“We were doing fine with just one man on the team,” she’d complained to Wymack, lifting a nano-manicured hand. “I’m supposed to believe this kid is worth it? He looks like one good poke from a nannybot would knock him off his board. Getting gender-balanced won’t get the League off your ass if he can’t race.”  
  
“Kevin thought he was something,” Wymack had told her. He’d nodded to Neil, who had been surprised; he thought his eavesdropping had been going unnoticed. “And so do I. Put it in a stasis tube and mail it, Reynolds.”  
  
“And we wouldn’t ever be, anyway,” Matt had said, raising an arm to sling it around Neil’s shoulders (Neil swiftly stepped away). “Kevin and I are clearly different genders but the League sticks us in the same category. The gender trinary is a myth.”  
  
“You know what I was about, Boyd, fuck you.”  
  
Aaron snorted. “Dan’s sharing?”  
  
“We’re not-- hey,” Matt protested, nearly tripping over their feet as they checked that Dan wasn’t within earshot. Neil had given up the conversation for pointless soon after that. Despite Neil’s inattention Matt had managed to press their own offer of help upon Neil several times over that first practice, and in the following week. What criteria they had used to determine that Neil was receptive, Neil didn’t know, but Neil’s repeated refusal failed to dampen Matt’s enthusiasm.  
  
To Neil’s astonishment, by the time his first month was up most of the Private Alimony Limited Megacorp (prev. Enterprise Terra Teller Organization) Foxes had extended similar overtures of kindness. Even Allison had come around, once Neil had demonstrated his dedication to their sport. And the bladed tongue he was quickly becoming infamous for. Apparently, before him, Dan had been the most outspoken of the group, and Allison was thrilled to have new material to repeat over her social network.  
  
Now Neil turned automatically to catch Matt’s reassuring grin and fist-bump. “It’s a tricky flip,” Matt said, the blue light of the track glancing off their white teeth. “I can’t get it reliably either.”  
  
“Kevin can.”  
  
“Kevin can do _everything,_ ” Matt said. The two of them turned to watch as Kevin effortlessly performed the flip Neil had botched, adding an extra two rotations just because sie could. Being on the same team as Kevin Day was both exhilarating and disheartening. Neil sighed and scratched under his helmet. He hated wearing the thing, but Wymack insisted when they were practicing new maneuvers. Apparently he’d seen too many catastrophic spills back at the beginning of things. Neil wanted to ask if that was why he used a hoverchair but he didn’t quite dare.  
  
Neil was at fifty-three percent accuracy (according to the run-down that popped up on his handheld) when practice ended. Renee and Wymack were the only other Foxes that used tech as outdated as a handheld anymore; the rest of the team cycled through eyescreens like fresh pairs of socks. Though Neil had a habit of forgetting to replace those, too, so it was fitting.  
  
“I’ll send over a list of what you did wrong before oh-sixteen-hundred tonight,” Wymack said, glaring around at them all. He wasn’t chewing them out immediately, which meant practice had gone well. Dan was settling into a satisfied smile. “Minyard, don’t think I didn’t notice you favoring your right side. See the medibot before you leave.”  
  
Aaron slammed his front wheel into the wall of the track, the amorphous plasma-glass absorbing the impact. “The medibot’s shit.”  
  
“And I care about your opinion like I care about last week’s organic refuse. Medibot, or I won’t let you in the next meet.”  
  
“With the way you’ve been lagging lately it might be better to just rely on Renee,” Kevin said.  
  
Aaron sneered. “Another late-night coaching session with Daddy? I’m not the one with one leg, asshole.”  
  
“I need to know I can trust you on the track.”  
  
“Shut up!” Wymack roared. Dan and Matt, the closest to him, jumped; Dan’s blades shot her into a high parabola on the rebound, clearing her so high she had to hold up a hand to avoid smashing her skull into the ceiling. Matt only stayed on their board by dint of grabbing Allison for support. Allison sighed and patted their shoulder as they scrambled to right themselves.  
  
“Shit-talk on your own time,” said Wymack, in marginally quieter tones. “You can trust each other for the same reason I trust you, results and sheer fool-headedness. Now get. I need to start the hydro-cleaner to get the stink of you all out of my track.”  
  
“Love you too, Coach,” Allison said. Wymack grumbled and waved both hands to chase them down the ramp towards the garage and locker rooms.  
  
Matt dragged Neil aside when they were changed back into street clothes.  
  
“I mean it, dude, you’ll get that Cork flip down,” they said. Neil knew from experience that Matt wanted to hug him. Matt knew from experience to restrain themselves to a hand on Neil’s arm. “One bad day isn’t anything.”

“Thanks, Matt,” Neil said. Matt shook their head—they could tell when Neil was upset, which had at first been unsettling but was now almost comforting—and patted Neil’s sleeve.  
  
“Eat real food tonight, yeah? You’ve got the credits for it.”  
  
“Yeah,” Neil agreed. He didn’t see the point of spending the money to get chewable food instead of nutrient capsules, but Matt and Allison and Dan went into hysterics when Neil said anything to that effect. Kevin didn’t care as long as Neil was getting the correct macromolecules in sufficient calorie amounts. Aaron didn’t care, in general. Renee said she understood, which was worst of all.  
  
Neil was the last one out of the locker room, as was his wont, leaving only Wymack to turn off the lights that Neil didn’t have the authorization to kill. The city outside was its usual noisy, multi-colored riot, spilling onto the front ramp from the wide front doors. A gauntlet of fans usually lingered at the end there, waiting. Today there was only one. Strange. Not that Neil minded. The only thing better than one waiting rabid fan was none.  
  
“Aaron’s not here,” he said, when he saw that the fan had blond hair. His suspicions were confirmed as he got closer; the fan had replicated Aaron’s features in what must have been a staggeringly expensive series of microsurgeries, from the downturn of his scowling brow to the hyperextension of his stocky legs. Had probably gotten height surgery, too, to match Aaron’s diminutive stature. Neil himself resented his height. Sporting idol or no, he didn’t understand why anyone would want to be shorter.  
  
Having people surge to look like him had been one of the least-desired parts of Neil’s rise to fame. The first time he had seen his own scars staring back at him from a stranger’s face his chest had gone cold and it had taken Kevin speaking into his ear for a full minute, repeating names and dates and true things, for Neil to return from the suffocating landvan and Lola’s knife-edge grin. And knife-edge knife.  
  
The nice thing about meal capsules was they didn’t require cutlery.  
  
The fan looked at Neil and didn’t move. Neil stuffed his hands into the pockets of his Fox-orange jacket and tried again. The fan’s bike was blocking his exit. Neil might have to hop the fence. “Fuck off. He went home.”  
  
The fan stared back with the one eye visible in profile, hand resting on the plush seat of his still-rumbling landbike. For all outward intents the fan looked bored, yet Neil had the prickling sense he was being examined, in a way kin to the medical sense. He opened his mouth to try again.  
  
“Fuck you,” said Wymack behind Neil, and Neil jolted, moving instinctively to the far side of the walkway as Wymack barreled down it. Wymack was not shy about dealing with clinging fans. And Neil had a moment of relief before Wymack spoiled it by breaking into a grin. Neil stared. “Coming back, Minyard?”  
  
Minyard? Did Wymack not see the difference in this fan’s posture, the spark in his eye that was calculation and not Aaron’s perpetual anger?  
  
The fan snorted. “Tell wonderboy over there I’m not my brother.”  
  
Wymack rolled his eyes. “Neil Josten, meet Andrew Minyard, your teammate’s brother. Twin, in fact.” Neil did not nod, nor did he extend his hand. Neither did Andrew. “Now. If you’re not here to come back to me, why the fuck are you here?”  
  
Before Andrew could respond the sirens went up: Vivaldi’s Winter concerto. A radiation sweep. Andrew turned his head enough for Neil to see his left side. His left eye glowed green; unnatural green, pulsing to the beat. An automated replication of the Mayor’s voice swept through the city, advising all citizens to stay calm and find their way to the nearest shelter. Neil barely heard it, transfixed by the truth Andrew’s eye had betrayed. Dangerous. Volatile. Possibly an ex-con. Neil stepped back.  
  
Wymack swore and jabbed his fingers back towards the track. “Both of you inside. We can continue introductions once we’re off the goddamn street.”  
  
Neil didn’t want to be closed in with someone who had been revealed as a threat to society. He hesitated.  
  
“Or if you’d rather huddle under the fucking minimart,” Wymack said, voice clipped, from where he was scanning the doors back open.  
  
That got Andrew moving. He brushed past Neil, forcing Neil to lean backwards over the railing to avoid him, and slunk inside with nary a glance Wymack’s way, nor a thank-you. He left his bike outside. Surprising; it was a beautiful bike, its owner notwithstanding, and the radiation would damage it.  
  
“I paid for a non-radioactive athlete,” Wymack called to Neil. Neil jumped and rushed inside, ignoring Wymack’s ambient profanity. The door zipped closed behind him. The darkness before the lights clicked on was absolute.  
  
The racetrack itself was the safest spot in the building, housed in lead and protected against bombs, natural disasters, and, of course, radiation. Wymack turned on only the perimeter lights and drove himself up next to the front row of stadium seats. “Get comfortable. Who knows how long they’ll take.”  
  
Neil waited until Andrew sat down and then found a seat a careful distance away. Andrew snorted and kicked his feet up onto the seat in front of him. “Calm down, little rabbit. My eye doesn’t let me eat the _truly_ good kiddies.”  
  
Neil was far from good. Or a ‘kiddie.’ “Rabbit?” he asked, before he could stop himself.  
  
“Extinct mammal, like a fox but smaller," said Wymack distractedly; he was checking his handheld. “Also a lot quieter.”  
  
Andrew ignored the hint. “You thought I was Aaron.”  
  
“I thought you were Aaron’s fan,” Neil corrected. “Are you the twin who’s the knockoff? The one nobody wanted?”  
  
“Nobody wants either of us,” Andrew said. He tilted his head from side to side, cracking his neck. “It must be awfully windy up there on that high hoverboard. Wasn’t your father a criminal too?”  
  
Neil clenched his fists. Professional athletes had their pasts rigorously scrutinized. His parentage was not one of the scarce things he’d managed to keep from the media. If he hadn’t seen his father die before his own natural eyes, he would not have dared debut. “Not anymore. He’s dead.”  
  
“You don’t sound sorry.”  
  
“I’m not.”  
  
Andrew’s eyes, the sickening green and the normal, flicked up and down Neil’s hunched form. “Interesting.”  
  
When the announcements came back on telling the citizens they could return to the streets, it was late enough for the underside of the skydome to show emerging constellations. Wymack spun his chair around and told Andrew to drive Neil home.  
  
“What? No,” Neil said, alarmed.  
  
“I already know where your house is,” Andrew said. His face was blank. Neil couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Aaron’s my brother. Do you really think I didn’t investigate every single one of his teammates?”  
  
Good point. “I can run.”  
  
“You will not,” said Wymack. “I don’t feel like dealing with the press shitshow if you get plasma-gunned down in a back alley because you went running after bedtime. Andrew will drive you or I’ll know why.”  
  
Neil opened his mouth to tell Wymack why and closed it again at Wymack’s laser-sharp glare.  
  
Outside, he hung back around Andrew’s bike. It was miraculously unharmed, and Neil saw why when Andrew thumped the back and it lit up. It was a conversion, land and hover, and so it would be radiation-proof as all hovercrafts were.  
  
Andrew swiped a pattern against the back of the seat and it extended. A second set of handles popped out of a slot in the middle. It would be a tight fit.  
  
“Don’t touch me,” said Andrew, swinging a leg over the front of the saddle. Neil was surprised he could get his leg that high with pants that tight.  
  
“I can still run.”  
  
“I don’t want the recycler-bait coming after me. It would be inconvenient.”  
  
Neil glanced back at the stadium, where Wymack was watching to make sure he followed directions (Wymack had learned a lot in the six months after signing Neil, unfortunately). With the strong feeling he was making a poor decision, he clambered onto the back seat, careful to not so much as brush Andrew’s jacket. Andrew fished a helmet out of his pocket and unfolded it. He tried to pass it back. Neil shook his head.  
  
Andrew shrugged, uncaring, and hung the helmet from one of the hand grips instead of placing it over his own head. Great, Neil thought; dangerous _and_ he has a death wish. The bike shuddered and rose a few centimeters off the ground.  
  
“Don’t fall off,” Andrew said, and kicked the pedals.  
  
Neil was grateful for the little personal handlebars. His own distaste for physical contact aside, sheer survival instinct would have made him seize Andrew around the waist to keep his seat. Neil had never liked hoverbikes; a board was a lot easier to handle. All the machinery was unsettling without the security of a closed-in car. He activated his friccer, belated, and hunched against the wind that Andrew’s wide back couldn’t break.  
  
What followed was one of the most terrifying rides of Neil’s life, and he’d once driven a landtruck with his knees after he and his mother had had their arms knocked out by stunners. There were four lanes of traffic in the city, the ground level (land vehicles and pedestrians), the strat-supported skyway, and two layers of hovercraft-only. Andrew zipped immediately to the top two and wove between them, dodging slower vehicles and grinding on the glowing edge of the road so carelessly Neil could feel the snap of the electricity pushing them within the lines. Andrew never quite broke the law—his eye would have sent a signal to the nearest police spire—but he skirted it so closely Neil could see the proverbial underwear lines. When Andrew nudged the speed up another ten kilometers Neil decided to focus on tightening his thighs and not looking down.

“You’re the one Allison’s been bitching about,” Neil said, When Andrew came to a stop—abrupt, of course, nearly throwing Neil into his back. Neil had to clench his abdomen hard to stop himself—in front of Neil’s apartment building. “The man on the Foxes who I replaced.”  
  
It was the only explanation for Andrew both knowing Wymack and for driving the way he did. Only an Exy racer had the kind of skill to keep up with Andrew’s sharp twists and fast turns. Or the recklessness.

Andrew swung off the bike, leaving it running so he had to drop the few centimeters to the sidewalk, and shook it by the handlebars. Neil’s stomach wobbled along with the bike. “Get off.”  
  
“Why did you stop? If you drive like that out here, you must have been amazing.”  
  
Quick as the flash of a track speed-reader. Andrew reached up. His fingers stopped before touching Neil’s skin, stayed by the friction armor. The red glow filled Neil’s vision as he flinched back. Andrew’s lips tightened. He remained almost-holding Neil, and it was as effective as if he were really keeping Neil there by a hand around his throat.  
  
“Because I don’t give a shit,” Andrew enunciated slowly. He held Neil a moment more, mismatched eyes burning into Neil’s, and then released him. Neil put a hand to his own throat where Andrew had come close and realized he was breathing heavily. He scrambled to the ground as quickly as he could. The underlit neo-concrete wavered beneath his rubber soles.  
  
“Get a better apartment. They pay you enough,” said Andrew, straddling the bike seat again. Then he was gone in an electric roar, the leftover static of his passage sparking the back of Neil’s tongue.  
  
  
There were seventeen Fox-diet-plan-approved restaurants within walking distance of Neil’s apartment. Twelve of them offered delivery, but Neil preferred not to let people know where he lived. His interaction with Andrew had shaken him. He considered staying in and finishing off the blister pack of Nutrio-Lite™ Dinner Capsules (Sport), but he had promised Matt. Neil didn’t like upsetting Matt. They were probably friends.  
  
The city at night was brighter than the city during the day. Screens blared projected images in front of every possible surface, advertising luxury hovercars, weight-loss programs, radioactive jewelry (safely contained within our crystal-clear setting!) and the billions of things the megastores sold that nobody needed. The streets and sidewalks and hoverlanes were lit from within, as were all but the most elderly of buildings. People milled about everywhere, made dark shadows by the light around them, visible only by their whirling glinting eyescreens.  
  
It was easy to disappear in a place like this.  
  
Since hitting national fame Neil had taken to wrapping a thin scarf over his mouth and nose to hide his scars, and pulling a nondescript cap down over what a romantically inclined journalist had once called “an artful tumble of ginger curls” (as opposed to the less flattering descriptors Allison slung at Neil three times a week, trying to bully him into getting a haircut). He bought a bowl of pasta at restaurant number six and folded himself into the cooking-oil smell of the furthest corner to listen to the other patrons’ conversations.  
  
“My daughter’s out at the farms now,” one of the people at the next table was saying, puffing out their chest. “She messaged me this morning. Says they’re planting peas.”  
  
“Peas!” said one of the table-mates. “Plant something useful, yeah? There are kinder leaves I’d like to grow.”  
  
“I don’t think peas have leaves,” said the third person, contemplative, and the table dissolved into amicable squabbling.  
  
Judging them a limited threat, Neil let his attention wander. The half-wallscreen that divided the front of the restaurant from the back was running a docu-series on Lola Malcom, “Surgeon to Second-in-Condemmed: The Story of 'Butcher' Wesninski’s Right-Hand Woman.”  
  
Neil forced himself to sit still, to act as if he were another un-connected person, idly watching the nearest screen while he ate his meal. He should have expected this. It had been nearly a year since Lola’s death. If anything, it was a surprise the filmmakers had waited this long. The actress depicting Lola had a larger chest and a far greater volume of hair than Lola had ever possessed in life. Lola would never have worn her hair loose around her shoulders like that. She always pulled it into a severe ponytail for efficiency. Neil slumped against the back of the booth and shielded his face with the end of the scarf he had been required to unwrap in order to eat.  
  
Aaron was probably watching the programme, Neil thought with a sickly prickle in the back of his throat. Aaron was fascinated with Lola. Neil had been nervous until Matt had drawn him aside and explained to him that Aaron had wanted to be a surgeon, and had fallen from that dubious grace as Lola had—though for a much less murderous reason, Matt had been quick to assure Neil.  
  
“He was good, too,” Matt had said. “He passed all the tests. But…”  
  
“But he used to be a drug addict,” Neil filled in, recalling the archived footage he’d seen when he’d researched his new teammates. Matt, who had shared Aaron’s once-penchant for hydrosprays, winced.  
  
“Passed all the tests except the background check,” said Allison, hooking elbows with Matt to swing herself into the conversation. “If Coach hadn’t picked him up he’d be begging for stimsticks on the street.”  
  
Neil remembered watching Exy under cover of his threadbare sleeping bag while his mother slumbered in the front seat. Whatever impulse drove people to seek out what they couldn’t have, to linger at the edges and snap up the watered droplets that trickled down, it had nearly killed him with the longing. He wondered how quickly Aaron would have run back to the drugs without the abstinence required by Exy.

* * *


	2. I-2

Dan had obtained Wymack’s handheld.  
  
“Put it back, I don’t need to see whatever weird messages my Dad’s been exchanging with Abby,” Kevin fussed, predictably. Sie fidgeted with the hem of hir practice shirt, legs jigging, even as sie leaned over to take a look.  
  
“Untwist your jock, I’m not looking at any of that,” said Dan. She tapped the loading screen repeatedly as the mascot of the handheld’s manufacturing company—an anthropomorphic data chip called “Pelly”—danced across it. “I’m trying to get to the livestream of the Ravens’ press release. It’s got a ten-minute delay before it hits the public datastream.”  
  
That shut Kevin up.  
  
“Come on, come on,” Dan whined, tapping faster. “There! Oh look, it’s Mister Dickman himself.” She angled the screen towards the Foxes behind her. Kevin leaned away, and then back in as if pulled by a magnetic summoning field. Neil had to duck under Renee and Allison’s linked arms in order to see.  
  
“Fucker,” Allison muttered as Tetsuji Moriyama waxed false about tradition and reputation. It was public knowledge that the Entertainment Associates (Ltd.) Ravens were backed by the US branch of the yakuza. Information spread too quickly for anything so scandalous to remain secret for long. The public simply didn’t care. It added to the flash of the Ravens, their dark pseudo-mystery; it made for more interesting Exy.  
  
It was pointless to hate the public for embracing sensationalization the way they had only been taught. Neil hated them anyway.  
  
Tetsuji announced that despite the unfounded accusations (and the sad premature death of his nephew), he would not be stepping down from his position as the coach of the nation’s finest Exy team. Kevin yanked on hir shirt so hard Neil thought sie might tear it. Dan sighed and turned off the handheld as the news cut to a report on intellectual property poachers.  
  
“Annoying but not surprising,” Dan said. Renee eased her arms out of Allison’s embrace to rub soothingly at Kevin’s tense shoulders.  
  
“We beat them last year,” Matt said. “We can do it again.”  
  
“Last year we had Andrew,” Kevin said dully.  
  
Allison stuck out her tongue and blew air. “You saying my girlfriend can’t handle them?”  
  
“Thanks for remembering I’m here too,” said Aaron. He banged his head against the row of eye-smartingly orange lockers, making Matt jump. “So kind.”  
  
“Always happy to be of service,” Allison said, a full octave higher than her normal speaking voice. “You’re very welcome, do visit our establishment again.”  
  
“Knock it off,” Dan said before Aaron could respond. Aaron scowled and banged on the lockers again. Neil wondered if he could bang hard enough to knock himself some manners.  
  
“We’ll all work hard,” Renee said to Kevin gently. “Remember, they’re not the same as they used to be, either. And Neil’s new to them. They won’t know what to expect.” She turned her smile to Neil. Neil squirmed uncomfortably until she looked away.  
  
Renee had a point. In the wake of Riko Moriyama’s death, the Ravens had become disorganized. Once Kevin had implied during an interview that the leg injury that had nearly ended hir career had been Riko’s fault, the Ravens had been subject to an official investigation, and several unofficial ones by enterprising individuals who sniffed a story. Tetsuji could deny his family’s involvement in the sport enough to pacify the government, but the fact remained that Kevin’s left leg had been shattered from the knee down and only repaired through a combination of experimental medical technology and Kevin’s refusal to give up. Dan reached across Kevin’s lap to pat hir regenerated knee in support. Kevin dipped hir head towards Dan gratefully.  
  
“You know they’re going to target me,” sie said, quiet.  
  
“We’ll have Wymack increase the security. For all of us,” said Renee firmly.  “Let them try to get close to this team. I still remember a thing or two about discouraging sabotage.” Her smile this time was less kind.  
  
Aaron thumped his head against the lockers a third time. The sound was beginning to give Neil a headache. “I hate increased security. I don’t need the government seeing my dick when I take a piss.”  
  
“And I hate replacing teammates,” said Renee, sharp. Neil noticed she was carefully avoiding looking at the cameras nestled in the corners of the ceiling. She was even better than Neil at picking out the spy-field that concealed—or revealed, if you knew what to look for—the location of recording devices. The rest of the team didn’t seem to care that they were being watched in the locker room, content to leave the how and why to the unavoidable ether of city life.  
  
Allison flinched at Renee’s tone, and Renee stopped massaging Kevin’s shoulders to take her hand and lace their fingers together. Neil remembered vaguely that the boardist he’d been signed to replace had died suddenly. It had been posited as a reason for Andrew’s resignation, by a reporter who made Neil wonder if she had ever spoken to Andrew in her life. Allison must have been close to the person.  
  
Wymack swore badly in English and then in Tagalog when he was given the news. He snatched his handheld from Dan and began typing furiously. After extracting promises that they’d go to the medibot to kick up the security settings on their eyescreens (and overseeing Renee and Neil to the same to their handhelds—Renee put on a good face, but Neil noticed her fingers clench for a moment around her device as she handed it over), he told them all to focus on the game and “leave the political shit to the coaches and authorities, or I’ll ban you fucks from the track for life.” It was only somewhat effective in calming the general unsettlement.  
  
“I don’t care who the fuck is after you,” Wymack said, powering onto the track after Kevin failed to catch a baton hand-off from Allison for the fifth time. “When you are here you are mine. You will focus on your riding and your teammates, and nothing else. Hey!” he snapped his fingers as Allison smirked and hissed something unflattering towards Kevin. “Listen to me. All of you. We are in one of the safest buildings in the fucking city. In the fucking country! The only people who can get in or out without help are in this room. Even ‘bots need my permission.”  
  
Neil glanced at the sanitationbot polishing the podium in the middle of the track. He hadn’t known that. He thought about the ‘bots waiting by the doors for Wymack to let them out for servicing, a sea of blinking status lights in the dark. The image made the hair on his arms stand up. Neil pressed a hand to his chest.  
  
“You’re safe in here,” Wymack continued, raising his voice. “Get your heads and your asses back on the track and show me what the stockholders are paying you all for.”  
  
“And make Tetsuji Moriyama eat our fucking static,” said Dan, which was, all things considered, a much more rousing pep talk.

 

Andrew was loitering outside again when the Foxes left, Neil for once with the rest of them instead of hanging behind. He was feeling the need for company tonight. It was not a feeling he was accustomed to. Renee saw Andrew immediately and angled her trajectory to meet him. They had a quiet conversation. Neil read their lips as far as greetings before Andrew saw him watching and blocked his mouth with a hand.  
  
“Why is he here?” Dan groaned. She bent forward to stretch her calf muscle, leaning on Matt for stability. Matt looked as if they’d been touched by the blessed spirit of one of the nu-age cults.  
  
Aaron eyed his twin with annoyance. “I’m not sure.”  
  
“He’s monopolizing Renee,” Allison said, stomping past them. She stopped a few meters from the whispered conversation, tapping her foot with increasing speed until Renee waved at Andrew and turned to take Allison’s arm. Andrew remained behind.  
  
“Whatever,” said Dan. She strode down the ramp, Matt following like a rather pathetic robotic valet. Neil and Aaron did the same, less enthusiastically.  
  
“Aaron,” said Andrew when they got within earshot. He completely ignored Matt and Dan. “Long time.”  
  
“No shit,” said Aaron, lip twisting. “What are you doing here? You said you were leaving.”  
  
“I’m still left.” Neil thought he saw Andrew’s green eye twitch. Nobody else reacted. “I’m here to take your new kid home. Wymack’s orders.”  
  
Neil frowned. “He only meant that once.”  
  
Andrew fixed him with his bored stare. Hazel: that was the color of his other eye, Neil saw now. It had been too dark the night before. “You want to argue that to him?”  
  
Neil considered. He was tired. Tired and hungry. “No.”  
  
From over by Dan, Matt made a wounded sound. “Neil. Dude. Don’t tell me you’re still walking home alone?”  
  
Neil’s silence was enough of a confirmation.  
  
“I can drive you, I told you! You said you’d started taking public transportation!”  
  
Public transportation was a hell to which Neil subjected himself as little as possible. “Sometimes. When the skydome is set to rain? Really hard?”  
  
“ _Neil_.”  
  
Neil shifted uncomfortably under Matt’s heartbroken gaze. “I know how to protect myself.”

“Doubtful,” Andrew cut in. He swiped to extend the seat and the passenger handlebars from the back of his cycle. It went smoother, this time. Neil wondered if yesterday had been the first time Andrew had used them. “Get on.”  
  
“Neil, don’t,” said Dan, aghast, as Neil clambered up, keeping his limbs well back as Andrew got on in front of him. He again refused the offered helmet.  
  
“Let Matt take you. Or the train. Hell, I’ll call you a taxi.”  
  
“Bye,” said Neil, as Andrew took them away.

 

It became a routine. Andrew was always outside when Neil left practice, no matter what time. Neil spent a paranoid three days convinced Andrew had cameras on him before Aaron pointed out that Andrew could simply have gotten the schedule from Wymack—or himself.  
  
Neil wasn’t sure why he kept climbing on the back of Andrew’s hoverbike. It was certainly a faster way to get home. Considering Andrew’s driving Neil wasn’t sure that it was safer. But Neil couldn’t deny that it was breathtaking, being present for Andrew’s skill, even if zipping that close to the larger hovervehicles made his heart threaten to jump out of his throat. He lost himself imagining how Andrew would ride on the track, dodging the other team instead of cars and busses, twisting mid-air. Aaron and Renee were solid cyclists—Wymack had signed them for a reason—but Andrew had a style that Neil burned to see properly.  
  
Neil didn’t ask again after that first night, why. Andrew’s answer didn’t make sense, but he’d given one, and clearly didn’t want further discussion.   
  
The third time Neil refused Andrew’s helmet, Andrew scoffed. “You some kind of adrenaline junkie? The friccer doesn’t keep you from brain damage. Clearly.”  
  
Neil scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t like things on my head.” Didn’t like the stifling feeling of being closed in. Didn’t like his vision blocked on either side. Didn’t like the way it reminded him of the stasis suit his mother had put him in once for a whole month, held in a twilight of wakefulness in a pocket underground beside her, breathing recycled air and trying not to feel the thousands of kilos of dirt above them.  
  
Andrew had met his eyes, a momentary touch, and never offered again.

 

Neil found out Andrew smoked around the sixth time, when Andrew careened out of traffic to stop on the hoverway shoulder and dig a cigarette out of his jacket. Neil had to lean back, bracing his hands on the hot metal of the bike, to avoid Andrew’s seeking arm. The ground was a dizzying drop.  
  
“This doesn’t affect you,” said Neil, cocking an elbow at the edge of the road.

Andrew stared, impassive. He put the cigarette to his lips and then, to Neil’s surprise, lit it. Neil hadn’t seen a cigarette with a truly burning flame since his mother.  
  
“How’re your carbon emissions?” Neil asked, watching the smoke curl past Andrew’s face. Andrew took another, deliberate drag. Neil gave up. He shifted on the seat. The awkward arch was turning his ass numb.  
  
Andrew turned sideways and propped his arm on the handlebars, at home on his bike in a way Neil never would be. Neil couldn’t help comparing it to the way he felt on his board. Andrew’s jacket wouldn’t be real leather—that had been outlawed more than a century ago—but Neil had seen contraband, and it was a good replication. It even wore like leather, rubbed smooth and shiny around the shoulders and the pockets. Neil knew from riding behind Andrew that it smelled like smoke. He’d figured somebody else in Andrew’s the building smoked. Andrew had been an athlete.  
  
Andrew tapped the ash off the end onto the front of his bike. It was strange, that he rode the bike so well—so often—and yet seemed to care little for it. “You want one?”  
  
It took a moment for Neil to realize Andrew was offering the carton of cigarettes. “No,” Neil said. “Drug testing.”  
  
“I remember,” said Andrew, tucking the cigarettes away.  
  
“Then why did you ask?”  
  
“O bright-eyed Hope, my morbid fancy cheer.”  
  
Neil shifted again. He’d need to do squats to get the feeling back. “That sounds like a poem.”  
  
Andrew said nothing.

“An old poem.”

Andrew said nothing.  
  
“Where did you get it?”  
  
“Same place I got this,” Andrew said. He tapped the fingers of his free hand against the temple by his left eye. “Do you ever shut up?”  
  
“No.”  
  
Andrew turned his face away, so all Neil could see of him was his left side, green-eyed, black-leathered and sharp-jawed like the delinquents in the books Neil remembered from his overabundance of elementary schools. He blew smoke in a curling ribbon towards the sky. Neil could smell it. He wondered if secondhand smoke could pass into the blood in a high enough percentage to be picked up by a prick test. He breathed in anyway.  
  
“Why do you come with me?” Andrew asked.  
  
“I don’t know,” said Neil. It was the truth.

* * *

Exy was an amalgamation of tricks spaced around a track and set to the tune of a relay. Part race, part electrified skateboarding, part art, and all spectacle, it was dubbed ridiculous by every sports commentator and most of the fans surrounding it.  
  
Neil loved it more than he knew how to breathe.  
  
The track was made up of hover-electro-magnetic tiles, which rippled and rearranged into obstacles that could be avoided or utilized to gain extra points. Each race proceeded in laps of baton-passing between bike, board, and skates, with the board as the final receiver. Completing the race gathered the largest payload of points; if a team put their effort into high-scoring tricks, however, they might pull ahead that way. This was viewed by most of the Exy community to be in bad spirit. The Terrapins had made it their defining feature.  
  
“Fuck,” Allison swore, dumping a water pouch over her head and grabbing another from the pit crew to suck down as they tested the flexion of her hoverblades, Dan racing in to take her place. “I missed a ramp to get the dickhead off my ass and guess what? They’ve turned around to slalom like a little bitch behind me! How the fuck are we supposed to keep up and not break our fucking legs?”  
  
The pit crew, which consisted of Aaron’s cousin Nicky and his husband Erik—both of them engineers when they weren’t putting in hours for Wymack’s pity of Foxes—tried to be supportive. “You’ll still get the big points when you outrace them,” Erik pointed out, tightening the straps around Allison’s ankles. Allison grimaced at him, and Erik stared back, his smile gaining an edge. He was in a long-term war with Allison about the tightness (or looseness, as Erik was of the opinion) of her boots. Neil had his opinions but wisely remained out of it.  
  
Nicky was more vindictive. “If you get Renee to peg grind for the next few cycles, you can wear them down with the screeching.”  
  
“And ruin her fucking bike along with our own ears? No thanks,” said Wymack, crossing behind Allison. The Terrapin cyclist did a handstand on the seat. Wymack frowned. “This isn’t Exy. This is hover-dancing.”  
  
“Nothing wrong with dancing,” Nicky said. Wymack pointed his glare in Nicky’s direction. Nicky was undimmed. “Can’t kick me out, Coach, we’re working for cheap.”  
  
“Yes, yes, and we’re very grateful,” said Wymack, pinching the bridge of his nose. Pit crews were expensive. They needed not only to be skilled at three types of hovermachinery but understand the effect of the shifting track, be able to withstand the tension of the meets, be able to work at near inhuman speeds, and get along with the team. It was the last one, Wymack said frequently, that was the reason pit crews hadn’t been replaced by ‘bots. Too many robotic limbs kicked across the track by frustrated Exy stars.

“One time I saw a team try to sneak a ‘bot into their practice lineup,” Allison had added once, with vicious glee. She flared her fingers and imitated the sound of an explosion. “Half the real racers got rushed to the medibot with shrapnel or electric burns.”  
  
“ _You’re_ an electric burn.”  
  
“Oh! Aaron! I didn’t know you’d failed to graduate primary school!”  
  
Sometimes Neil wondered how the Foxes were still in business. They were cobbled together by nothing more than poor childhoods and un-notarized debts.  
  
Kevin flipped hir board over hir head, tucking it back under hir feet at the last second before sie hit the track. Renee stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled, the sound lost in the din of the crowd. Matt shouted as they clapped beside her.  
  
“Move, and don’t loosen them,” Erik said, shooing Allison out of the pit as Aaron roared into it, shaking his head. Sweat flew out in a fan from Aaron’s bangs.  
  
“Renee!” Wymack shouted. Renee was already jamming her gloves back on and shooting up onto the track, fitting into the break of the relay. The crowd cheered. Renee was a favorite.  
  
“That’s my girl,” Allison said proudly around her third water pouch.  
  
Neil readjusted his kneepads, heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his spine. There was living; and then there was Exy. The two didn’t compare for one second.  
  
Aaron was squabbling with Nicky as Nicky twisted a plasma wrench under the track of his front wheel. “It’s crooked,” Aaron was saying, hitting the flat of his hand against the side of the bike by his knee. “I can feel it. The emitters are misaligned. I told you last time!”  
  
On the track, the Terrapin boardist was circling Dan in tightening spirals. Dan attempted to dodge out of the way, hopping on a suddenly- formed rail. The boardist followed. Dan’s frustrated grimace filled the screens around the stands.  
  
“Josten, you’re up the next one,” Wymack said. Neil nodded. He flexed his gloves.  
  
“Now the back is out of alignment! Erik—”  
  
“It’s not, you’re just used to it being out.”  
  
“It’s my damn bike, I can feel when it’s wrong!”  
  
“Trust your pit crew, Aaron,” Nicky chided.  
  
“You--!”  
  
“Now!” Wymack shouted, as Kevin shot down the ramp to the pit. Neil passed hir on the way in, slapping his gloved palm against Kevin’s. Aaron’s tirade was cut off as Neil passed through the plasma-glass surrounding the track, the oddly liquid feeling of it clogging all sound, and then there was nothing but the track in front of him.  
  
He angled the front of his board up to speed past the Terrapin flanking him, ignoring the twist the Terrapin put in their path in favor of gaining a strong lead. There was always a loss of distance at a switch. Juggling a fresh rider with the unfortunately inescapable loss of collective speed was strategy as much as it was skill. Neil waited until he was half the track in front of the Terrapin cyclist and then slid over to catch the upramp that had risen out of the track to his right.  
  
At the apex of his jump he flipped forwards, the blood pounding in his ears. The moment of freefall, exhilarating; and then the board back under his feet. He knew he was being projected on the screens, but he put it out of his mind. All that mattered right now was himself, and his board, and his teammates. He was catching up to Dan. She signaled Neil to take the baton, so he reached—strained—the baton smacked into Neil’s glove, magnets clicking home. Dan raised a fist in celebration.  
  
Tricks were worth more when you were carrying the baton. Neil used the wall as resistance to shoot himself in a diagonal, crouching low to dip his free hand close to the track. Electricity crackled against his fingertips. He drew in his elbows for a spin, but the Terrapin boardist put on a burst of speed to match him and block his trajectory. Neil set his jaw and rose higher to try again. The Terrapin followed him.

He’d made three circuits of the track already. Neil could hear the memory of Wymack’s voice telling him to shit or get off the pot. He abandoned his spin and shoved off the wall again for a horizontal stand, worth fewer points than a spin but more than nothing. He regained his speed to get out of the Terrapin’s interference and waved at Renee to offer the baton. She grabbed it from his hand as Neil shot past.  
  
The Terrapin cyclist tried to run Dan into the track. Dan dodged, but she lost control of a skate and went careening into the wall before she could get back upright. She swore and pounded at her chest, trying to get her friccer to stop glowing. It was a common impulse and Neil wasn’t sure if it was effective, but he’d found himself doing it as well. A rail rose up beside him, and Neil nudged his board to ride it, lifting his arms over his head and curling his toes inside his shoes to try to stay on.  
  
Dan disappeared into the pit and Allison shot on, Allison’s arm dropping from her ponytail as she banked hard. Neil nodded at her and tilted upwards to gain more speed. His stomach was somewhere around his armpits.  
  
What chance had living against Exy?  
  
“Good work,” Wymack shouted when Neil skidded into the pit, slapping palms with Matt on his way past. “We’re well ahead. Their tricks are deteriorating.”  
  
Neil accepted a water pouch from Erik and caught his breath as he and Nicky checked over his board, squinting at the score display on the wall across from him. The Terrapins were losing ground. The Foxes were ahead and gaining a lead that the Terrapins would have to work hard to overtake. Neil returned Nicky’s joyous fist-bump and collapsed over the railing beside Dan.  
  
“We got this, kid,” she said, gap-toothed smile stretching wide. “Easy-peasy.”  
  
“I don’t think peas have leaves,” Neil said.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I said, yeah.”

 

Dan was right. They won not only the race but also the score, by a considerable amount. Lining up for handshakes on the track afterwards was difficult on Neil’s aching feet, as it always was, but worth it for the victory.  
  
“Good job,” Kevin said afterwards, for Neil’s ears alone. Neil hoped the look he sent in return wasn’t too obviously grateful. It was bad for Kevin’s ego to let hir know how much sie was admired.  
  
On the hoverbus back from the meet Neil sat beside Kevin, too keyed-up to attempt sleep. Behind him, Allison snored softly. Renee, Aaron, and Matt talked in quiet voices. Dan was up front with Wymack and the pit crew, talking louder.

Kevin’s legs were jiggling anxiously. Since they’d just won the Terrapins race, sie was worried about something else.

“You don’t think the Foxes can beat the Ravens, this time,” Neil said.  
  
Kevin looked down at hir shoes. “I think after last year, they’re worried. I think _they_ think we think we can beat them. And I think they’re going to do something to break that belief. ”  
  
Neil nodded.  
  
“The master.” Kevin rubbed hir palms on the sides of hir pants. Swallowed. “Aren’t you worried he’ll come after you as well?”  
  
“No,” said Neil, fear rushing through him. He’d been lulled into complacency with the Foxes and the sure knowledge of his father’s death _.  Stupid._ He felt the ghost of his mother’s hand.

Kevin met Neil’s eyes. Hir own were hollow. “Thea messaged me after the meet. She pointed out that you were once part of my bro—of Riko’s perfect team as well.”  
  
Neil drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. If he hid the rapid beating of his heart from Kevin, maybe he could ignore it himself.  “They’ve had this long to come after me, and they haven’t. That’s what Coach would say. And Matt.”  
  
“You know, Matt thinks you’re as naïve as you think they are.”  
  
“Maybe we’re both right,” Neil mumbled into his knees. After all, he still wasn’t running. He scrubbed his fist over the burn scars on his cheek.  Once he’d asked his mother why they bothered with things like hair dye and drip-contacts when they could simply surge their faces to different ones, and get a couple more pieces of Neil changed while they were at it. His mother had slapped him and told him she didn’t trust anyone whose job necessitated you being unconscious.  
  
“You should know better,” she’d hissed. “ _Nathaniel.”_  
  
Neil remembered the sudden chill in his chest, his stomach. His father had preferred him awake, but for his mother, not as much. From the hard distant look in her eyes consciousness was as much of a mercy as it was a punishment. Neil had never asked again.  
  
And here he was now, a professional Exy player. He’d never been more recognizable.  
  
Kevin dug hir fingers into the scratchy material of the seat. “My dad will protect me. Us. I have to believe that.”  
  
Neil said nothing, but he thought Kevin might the most naïve of them all.

 

The next morning Neil got up early and looked up Andrew Minyard.  
  
DANGEROUS—TAKE CAUTION blared across the wallscreen, and Neil twitched his fingers impatiently to minimize the warning. He knew that, yes. He found articles of Andrew’s Exy career, including a number of videos, which he sent to the top corner to watch later. Andrew’s ex-criminal status was a sensation point in a number of the hits, but it took Neil a good amount of sifting to find an actual run-down of his offenses.  What he found seemed mundane. Neil frowned. Assault, robbery, excessive use of force. . . Andrew had been on mood modulators for years following aggravated assault. . . was a witness in his brother’s murder trial due to--  
  
Neil stopped. He’d known Aaron had been on trial for murder, but that it had been ruled an acceptable offense, and Neil hadn’t been interested enough to look further. But the unfeeling sans-serif letters, an afterthought on the page, twisted everything Neil thought he knew about it into a queasy knot in the middle of his stomach.  
  
He turned off the wallscreen and stuffed his feet into his shoes, and jogged down the perpetually-broken SMART Staircase™ to the gym on the bottom floor of his apartment complex. He lost himself in the blue pulse of the treadmill, and tried not to think of the twist to Andrew’s mouth when he’d tried to reach for Neil’s throat and had been stopped by nothing more than sold-in-every-sports-equipment-store friction armor.

 

Practice the next day ended with a two-handed baton pass from Dan to Matt, Dan Savannah-grinding forwards on an overhang and Matt backwards. When Wymack shouted that they could get off the track, Matt threw their arms out to either side of them and let themselves drop, trusting their friction armor to absorb the brunt of the shock as they landed. Neil watched with mild amusement as Matt sat up, rubbing the back of their head and wincing.  
  
“Ow!”  
  
“You knew that would happen.”  
  
“Hope springs eternal,” Matt said, and Neil remembered Andrew saying something about hope. Some funny old poem.  Would Andrew have watched Matt fall, or have turned away? He certainly wouldn’t have tried to stop him. If none of the Foxes here had done that, the one too blunt even for them would hardly break the mold.  
  
The others were out quickly, eager to catch a show that Neil had no interest in. Neil thought Kevin probably had no interest either, but Kevin seemed to like going places with the Foxes. Neil did sometimes. Not today. Today his head was fuzzy, stuffed with cloth. Or maybe pillows, crammed together like in the photos he’d been forced to look at of Allison and Renee’s apartment.

Andrew was not there when Neil left the track.  
  
Neil turned back and looked again. Maybe he’d suffered a stroke. Nothing bad enough to keep him from Exy, he hoped. Andrew was still not there. Neil knew the way home, but he hadn’t run it for two months. He loitered by the railing, feeling the conspicuous vagrant he’d always tried his hardest not to look like, his chest heavy enough to sink through the neo-concrete.  
  
It wasn’t like he needed Andrew. They weren’t friends. They barely talked. Andrew drove him home, and stopped to smoke, and grunted sometimes at Neil’s stream of chatter. Neil found himself sniffing around for cigarette smoke and stopped. How would he even smell it in the city, if it were there? There were a thousand worser scents to find here first. Like the overcooked bean sausages of the cart in front of the business firm next door, going rancid in the heat.  
  
The electric roar of a hovercraft cut through Neil’s thoughts. Andrew was speaking before Neil turned around. “Get on. Now.”  
  
Andrew’s eyes were wide, his fingers drumming the handlebars in rhythm. His mouth was an unimpressed line as usual.  
  
Neil knew the look of a person being chased. He’d spent much of his life in that position.  
  
“What did you do?”  
  
“Nothing yet,” Andrew said. “Get on.”  
  
“The second seat isn’t out.”  
  
Andrew swore and kicked at the pedals. The bike jumped beneath him. “You can hold on to my waist. Get on or I’ll leave you behind.”  
  
Neil got on.

* * *


	3. II-1

_**II.** _

Life has loveliness to sell,

     Music like a curve of gold,

Scent of pine trees in the rain,

     Eyes that love you, arms that hold,

And for your spirit's still delight,

Holy thoughts that star the night.

* * *

 

He had barely gotten his leg over the seat before Andrew gunned the bike forward, shooting across the packed street and entering a sharp incline. Neil scrambled to grip the seat underneath him, fingernails biting into the faux-leather. He could feel himself slipping. His orange Fox jacket dangled from his shoulders.  
  
“Hold the fuck on!” Andrew shouted, reaching back. He grabbed Neil’s wrist and slammed it against his own stomach, yanking Neil flush to his back. Neil bunched his fist around a handful of fabric when Andrew let go, an _oof_ forcing itself out of his lungs and onto the back of Andrew’s neck as Andrew jumped the speed up yet again. He looped his other arm around Andrew’s waist to clasp his hands together, fumbling to slot his knees behind Andrew’s. The seat was not meant for two people.  
  
“Where are we going?” he shouted in Andrew’s ear, because they certainly weren’t going the way to Neil’s apartment. Andrew didn’t answer. He banked left, forcing the jut of Neil’s pelvis uncomfortably against his back. Neil bit his tongue and tasted blood. He turned his head to spit off the side of the bike and saw a small child looking up at himself and Andrew in wonder, an Exy-player plush dangling from their miniature hand. As if in slow motion Neil could see the projection of the face on the stuffed head, switching through all the Foxes in turn. His own face was last, high-definition scars rendered beside an exaggeration of Neil’s blue eyes.  Neil had the dizzying impulse to wave himself hello. He clutched tighter at Andrew’s waist instead.  
  
Riding like this was so, so different from riding on the extra seat. Here Neil could feel every flex of Andrew’s body before he moved, the bunching of his forearms as he clicked through gears. The open flap of Andrew’s jacket smacked against Neil’s thigh, battered in the wind the bike was generating. Andrew’s hair, longer than Aaron’s, caught in Neil’s nose and mouth and streaked the soapy taste of hair gel across his lips. Neil coughed and tried to wipe away the fine strands against Andrew’s collar. He wasn’t very successful.  
  
Andrew was hot. The bike underneath him gathered more heat than Neil remembered from the other seat, and he was a coil of a thermo-unit against Neil’s front, a better shield against the bitter cold of hoverbiking than without. Neil’s back was frozen in comparison. If he’d known Andrew was planning on killing them both with whiplash today, he would’ve worn a thicker jacket.  
  
Neil hid his face in Andrew’s shoulder, smoke-scent surrounding him, and held on tight.  
  
When he looked again it was because the ride had suddenly gone bumpy, gravel plinking up the sides of the bike and stinging Neil’s legs through his pants. “You’re off road?”  
  
Andrew grunted, which Neil felt in the arms wrapped around Andrew’s chest instead of hearing. Neil supposed it had been an obvious question. He looked up and recognized the spike of a police tower at the edge of the city proper. A tap on Neil’s cheek: Andrew handed back a rebreather, winking a rainbow prism between his fingers, his own already on.

“We’re leaving the city?” Neil said, not believing it even as Andrew slid between two buildings, gravel ricocheting off the walls to hit Neil’s face. A trickle of sweat, or maybe blood, itched at his forehead. “Andrew, your eye.”  
  
Andrew twisted his head, enough for Neil to see his face, the clench of his jaw. His green eye burned. His natural eye burned fiercer. He clipped the rebreather he’d been digging into Neil’s cheek to Neil’s nose, making Neil suck in a breath at the hard pinch and the stale taste as it processed the air coming into his lungs. “I said I hadn’t done anything _yet_.”

Neil was an Exy star. He couldn’t go to prison. He’d be kicked off the team. Even Wymack wouldn’t be able to stop it. He’d be banned from playing forever.  
  
“Stop panicking,” Andrew said. Neil couldn’t hear him, but he was close enough to watch the movement of his lips. “I’ve done this before.”  
  
“That’s reassuring.”  
  
The gate guard shouted at them as they shot over the rim ringing the city limits. Andrew ignored them. The plasma skin of the skydome let them through with a viscous _snap_ like the popping of a bubble.  
  
The difference once they were out of the city was stark. Neil had thought the ride clunky before, but this jolted him almost out of the seat and bruised his ass and thighbones. Andrew swerved back to the road jutting out from the rim and that helped, some, especially when Andrew kicked the bike back to hover, but Neil could feel the difference. Country roads always felt different from city roads. Too blunt, wide strokes instead of the minute clarity of city life. Neil thought he had forgotten, but his body shifted automatically into a looser seat to account for it. He realized he was cutting off Andrew’s circulation and eased his arms up enough for Andrew to breathe.  
  
The incessant beeping of Andrew’s eye that had started as soon as they’d crossed the rim was growing to an unignorable pitch. That had to be painful, but Andrew acted as if he didn’t notice. Neil chanced a glance backwards and saw a convoy of police cruisers issuing from the city gates.  
  
“Andrew.”  
  
“I know,” Andrew said. He sped up. The wind wrapped Neil’s hair around his face, but he couldn’t chance letting go of Andrew to tie it back. Neil’s neck throbbed as it was pushed back by the airstream.  
  
He realized, with the hysterical sense of impending doom, that he wasn’t wearing his friccer. The world sharpened to Andrew’s back, the corded heat of his thighs, the two-step beat Neil could feel of Andrew’s heart. He knew the police were still following, but they were fuzzy blobs in the background. Andrew was the only thing keeping Neil from falling to his death. He drew a ragged breath, yanked his head around, and pushed his closed eyes once more against Andrew’s smokecloud collar. The scream of Andrew’s eye above his ear warped into phantasm. Neil didn’t have the lungs to shout, so he tumbled inside-out inside the sound, throat and shoulders thrilling with fear, holding on to Andrew, holding, holding.  
  
How long it was later Neil didn’t know, but he only realized Andrew had slowed down because his jacket had a moment of rest against his back. Neil swallowed through his dry mouth and emerged from Andrew’s collar.  
  
“They always get bored,” Andrew said. The rebreather made him nasally. He tilted his head, and Neil realized his eye had stopped beeping, settling into the less-blinding glow of everyday readiness. “It’s outside the city so they don’t give two fucks in a stasis cell.”  
  
“Won’t you get in trouble when you come back?” Neil’s voice was a croak.  
  
Andrew twitched his lips to the side, as if to say, who cares. Neil sighed.  
  
“I can see why Coach got rid of you,” he said.  
  
“I left,” said Andrew.  
  
The road beneath them was doing something odd. Instead of blue, it was fading to a sunset orange. Almost like the Foxes’ standard, at first, and then tinged gradually more to yellow until it reminded Neil of the incandescent lightbulb he’d seen in a museum his mother had worked at for a handful of weeks. “What’s happening?”  
  
Andrew slowed down further. “No nuclear out here. They don’t need the color. It’s their way of making a joke.”  
  
The yellow glow was mesmerizing. “How do they get enough power?”

“I’ll tell you how the sun rose, a ribbon at a time.”  
  
“That’s another poem.”  
  
“Your observation skills are unparalleled.”

Slowly the rocky land surrounding the road began to grow grass, then shrubs, then the faint beginnings of a forest. Private vehicles were rare between cities. Neil and Andrew passed mainly company transports, full of dehydrated food or clean water or stacks of tomorrow’s fashion. Most of them were driven by satellite signal, but they passed a family with a car piled high with souvenirs going the opposite direction. Andrew surprised Neil by lifting his hand to wave back to the child who smiled at them.

They passed off onto a side road when the trees started clumping together in twos and threes, the hoversurface even more yellow-bright than the last. The tiles were an odd shape, triangles instead of hexagons. Neil had once crossed over a jungle, smuggled in the back of a freight transport, but he had never been in a forest like this. Crown-shaped leaves and twisting ivy nestled atop mossy bark like the illustrations from a children’s holobook. He’d thought such things were gone. Like foxes. And rabbits.  
  
Andrew said, “It wasn’t like this when they started. They’ve been rebuilding the forest for fifty years.”  
  
For once, Neil had nothing to say. He nodded. A bird—a real bird?—chirped overhead, and then another, and then a flock burst from a hanging curtain of leaves a bare meter form the road. Andrew stopped the bike to let them pass. They were blue on the backs and white underneath, like the cleaning ‘bots that took care of the Court.

Someone not as trained as Neil would have missed the edge of the settlement, the first, bare vestiges of human habitation. The slight disturbance of an air filtration field rippled over Neil’s skin, raising the hair everywhere he wasn’t covered by his clothing. It was similar to the wall of the track, but thinner.  
  
Andrew noticed him noticing. “Maybe you’re not completely useless.”  
  
They traveled another fifty meters before Andrew turned a sharp right, following another branching track that Neil had lost in the undergrowth. The yellow glow coming up from the carpet of browned needlelike leaves turned Andrew’s gentle path into a fairy story, like the ones Neil had watched in school back before his mother had taken him and run. The sky was growing dark, filtering down through the leaves in dip-dyed shadows.  
  
“I’ve got to go home,” Neil mumbled against Andrew’s neck.  
  
“That shithole of an apartment you sleep in isn’t a home.”  
  
“What do you know?”  
   
“More than you.”

At the next turn Andrew stopped the bike and got off. Neil made to step off behind him, automatically following his movement after being pressed against his back. It felt as if his limbs had become locked around Andrew, as if he were a strange exoskeleton that Andrew directed to do as he wished. Andrew held up a hand and Neil stilled.  
  
“We’re going to meet some people,” Andrew said. In the darkness the glow of his green eye was blinding. It gave a sickish pallor to the rest of his face, the interruption of his of his nose dragging blocky shadows along the lee. When Neil blinked he saw in green after-spots.  
  
Neil examined his conscience for fear and found only apprehension. “What kind of people?”  
  
Andrew’s jaw clenched. “You’ll be back by the time your precious Exy practice starts.”  
  
“That’s not an answer.”  
  
“You haven’t earned an answer from me yet,” Andrew said. He propped the heel of his hand on the seat, just in front of Neil, and leaned up so Neil’s face was centimeters from his own. He must have realized the friction armor was off; Neil would have had trouble holding on to him otherwise. But this time Andrew made no move to strangle him.  
  
Andrew said, “You will trust me to keep you safe.”  
  
Neil thought, I don’t trust anyone. He said, “Yes.”  
  
“You’re an even bigger idiot than I thought,” Andrew said. He stepped back and gestured for Neil to get off the bike. Neil did.    
  
They left the bike there by the side of the hover-road, propped against a tree. Neil ran his fingertips over the rough surface and made a sound when a piece of it broke off, peeling like a bandage. The tree-wound underneath was softer wood, when Neil dug his fingernail into it.  
  
“It’s called bark,” Andrew said when Neil showed him the broken-off piece. Neil tucked it into the pocket of his jacket. Andrew scoffed but didn’t stop him.  
  
It was like the heel-turn of a hoverblade; they were surrounded by the forest, and then they weren’t. A flat clearing stretched out before them, dotted with humped shapes indistinguishable from the nightmares Neil’s mind concocted to explain them. Andrew’s hand brushed the small of Neil’s back.  
  
The ground was a series of regular smooth lumps. Neil scuffed the toe of his shoe against it and felt the seams between the panels, deeper than on a hovertrack. It felt like concrete, the older kind, staid and unhelpful. “Cobblestones,” Andrew said.  
  
A triangle of the soft yellow light appeared in the nearest hump.  A figure appeared in the center, sprouting legs, arms, a fluffy head as Andrew and Neil drew closer. Neil froze. Andrew pressed his back.  
  
“You must be Neil,” said the figure.  
  
The breath condensed in Neil’s throat.  
  
“Relax,” Andrew murmured in his ear. “You’re a national Exy star, you have to get used to people knowing who you are.”  
  
Neil forced his fists to unclench. He took a shuffling step forward when Andrew prompted with another shove.  
  
“I expect Andrew’s told you nothing,” the figure said. They were smiling. Neil didn’t smile back. “I’m Betsy. Welcome to Eden.”  
  
Under Andrew’s direction Neil let himself be led into the hump and down a short hallway to a room with lopsided triangle corners, coming to a rounded point at the top. “I’ll let you get settled in,” said Betsy, and left them. Neil rubbed his arms and watched the door to the room until he couldn’t hear Betsy moving anymore. Only Andrew’s utter unconcern kept him from bolting.  
  
There was a narrow bed shoved against a slanted wall, and a single, doubtful-looking table. The bed was made up with sheets. Neil gave it a wide berth and checked each of the three corners for hidden traps or cameras. He checked them again. He checked them a third time and, finding nothing, let his attention be pulled as it always seemed to be back to Andrew.  
  
He was standing by the three-pointed window, the delicate cool of midnight creeping in. Andrew lit a cigarette and hung it out into the night. Neil drifted closer.  
  
“Drug testing,” Neil said, though Andrew hadn’t offered.  
  
Andrew snorted. “I smoked every day when I was on the team. If you’re good enough they don’t give a shit.”  
  
“So you were good.”  
  
“Yes.” It was similar to how Kevin said it, not bragging, simply a statement of fact. But there was passion behind Kevin’s words. Andrew’s were simply…dead.  
  
Neil didn’t like it. He realized he had gotten attuned to the subtle inflections Andrew put into his speech, flat-sounding to anyone who didn’t know how to listen. Who didn’t want to.  Neil wanted to.  
  
“And you think I’m good, good enough for them to overlook the nicotine.”  
  
“I don’t think anything about you at all.”  
  
Neil dodged the ash Andrew flicked his way. “I think about you. When I’m on the track. I want to race with you. Or against you.”  
  
Andrew lit another cigarette. He wasn’t done with the first one yet. Fire-burning cigarettes were difficult to find, but Andrew held the new one out the window before him and clicked open and shut his lighter, burning blue electric into tobacco red until the cigarette was gone.  
  
There wasn’t enough wind for the window to dissipate the smoke. It filled the air between them, a pocket apart from the far dark corners of the room. Neil took a deep breath and held it.  
  
He said, “I can’t sleep here.”  
  
Andrew looked at him. Normally he made a point to face Neil with his left side. This time Neil was on his right. Neil could tell it made Andrew nervous.  
  
“I don’t know where we are. I don’t know this Betsy, or whoever else is here. I have no weapons and I didn’t eat dinner.” Neil heard the pitch of his words climbing high, but was powerless to stop it.  
  
Andrew slowly, so slowly, reached out a hand. Neil stepped closer, and Andrew rested the hand on the back of Neil’s neck. His fingers were cold, rough with callous. Most people who didn’t need callouses got their skin laser-softened.  
  
“I know your past,” Andrew said. “I looked you up, remember.”  
  
Neil said, “I still sleep with a plasma gun under my pillow.”  
  
Andrew’s fingers tightened over the knob at the top of Neil’s spine. “You won’t smoke a cigarette but they let you sleep with a gun?”  
  
“I’m not a criminal anymore.”  
  
“You are. You’re just famous enough that it doesn’t matter.” Andrew released Neil’s neck, bringing his hand back to his side. Neil missed the weight of him. “I never sleep anyway. I’ll keep watch.”  
  
Neil didn’t know why that brought him such comfort. Maybe it was the breadth of Andrew’s shoulders, still muscular even after leaving the sport. Maybe it was the hard surety in Andrew’s natural eye. Neil wondered why he could see it, with the lights off. He looked out the window and saw the moon. He had not seen the moon since--  
  
Neil wasn’t sure.  
  
He curled up in the bed closest to Andrew, facing the window and its miraculous moon, illuminating the sentinel before it, and slept.

 

Neil woke to the sensor on his suit chiming that it needed to be changed. He thumbed it off and reached to turn off his wallscreen alarm—and then startled when his fingers hit empty air. He thrashed out from under his covers, tangling them around his waist, and had a hand on the door fumbling for the lockpad before he remembered where he was.  
  
“I pity your downstairs neighbors,” Andrew said from the window. Neil twisted, sheets trailing, and found him sitting in the same place he’d been before Neil fell asleep. Neil wondered if Andrew had moved at all the entire night. It didn’t look like he had. That couldn’t be good for muscular mobility.  
  
Andrew said, “Kevin messaged me. Sie wanted to know where you were.”  
  
“What did you tell hir?”  
  
“I didn’t.” Andrew stood, crossing his arms. Neil watched him for signs of stiffness but Andrew showed none.  
  
“I’d better call hir before sie throws a fit,” Neil said. His handheld was still in his pocket, pressing a tender bruise into his thigh. Neil sent a quick message to Kevin and turned off his handheld before Kevin could fuss at him. The ache in his ribs from sleeping clothed was an old acquaintance; nothing terrible had happened to Neil because of it yet.  
  
There was a clatter and a clank from deeper in the building.  
  
“That’s beeyannabee cleaning up,” said Andrew, inscrutably. “You’d better hope breakfast isn’t all over the floor.”  
  
“A morbid fancy cheer?”  
  
Andrew’s right eye twitched.

It turned out that beeyannabee meant “Bee, and Abby.” Bee was Betsy, the one who had opened the door. They looked less imposing in the morning brightness. The other one, to Neil’s surprise, he had heard of before. Abby was the woman Wymack was possibly dating.  
  
“I’m glad to hear the team is doing well,” Abby said, setting down plates of fresh, un-dropped vegetable mash (the other had been swept out the door). She kissed Bee on their sheepish face before sitting down. Neil had never seen a table this heavy. It must have taken three people to carry it into the kitchen. “David can be a pessimist, and it’s difficult to keep up with city news out here. Somehow it doesn’t seem important.”  
  
Neil nodded and pretended he understood. Years of going hungry meant that he couldn’t ignore food put before him, so he took a bite. Pain exploded across his tongue. Neil spat the bite out and leapt up from the table, overturning his chair. He scrubbed his lips with his fingers. “You poisoned it!”

“Neil, no, Neil,” Abby said, holding her hands out. Neil took another step back, towards the door he’d seen coming in. If he ran now, he could dodge Abby grabbing him. Bee was clumsy and seemed calm, but perhaps that was a ruse.  
  
“Sit down, adrenaline junkie,” said Andrew. Neil’s careening panic paused, teetering on the edge of a drop-off. Andrew stared Neil directly in the eyes and took a deliberate bite of his food. Chewed. Swallowed. Then he leaned forward and picked a much smaller piece from Neil’s plate. Neil shouted and moved forward, but Andrew had already put it in his mouth. Neil watched, heart pounding, but Andrew only grimaced and chased it with another large bite of his own food. After several seconds waiting for Andrew to react as he had, the rushing in Neil’s ears started to ease away.  
  
“It’s spice,” said Bee, calmly. Neil had the distinct feeling they were holding back a laugh. He narrowed his eyes at them. “It’s all right to eat. Look.” They took a piece of Neil’s food and ate it, as Andrew had. Probably they wouldn’t do that if it were really poisoned. Neil took one, two, three small steps back to his overturned chair and picked it up, sitting down on the very edge.  
  
“We weren’t sure if you’d like it,” Abby said. She was smiling, her eyes sympathetic. It made Neil’s skin crawl. “You’ve grown up in cities, Andrew said. We gave you a half-portion of the cayenne, but I see it was still too much.”  
  
Andrew grunted. He had vegetable mash stuck to the side of his face.  
  
“Andrew doesn’t,” said Bee, still not-laughing. “He likes his food boring.”  
  
Andrew pointed his chopsticks across the table. “That’s violating doctor-patient confidentiality.”  
  
“You’re not my patient anymore, Andrew,” said Bee serenely.  
  
Neil felt as if everything was jumbling up inside his head.  
  
“Try it again,” Abby encouraged. She ate a bite of her own food. “Just a little bit, when it’s not such a shock.”  
  
Tentatively, Neil picked up a meal-capsule-sized portion of vegetable mash and put it in his mouth. The burning pain was still there, but as he concentrated, he could taste the flavor around it. He took another bite.  
  
“I told you you’d like it,” said Abby. As she had told Neil no such thing, Neil wasn’t sure what she was so smug about. He took a third bite. Once he knew what he was getting into, the spice wasn’t bad.  
  
They made conversation over breakfast, which Neil fumbled at. He was used to eating quickly, and alone. He learned that Abby had been the physician for the Foxes before she’d left to come live in Eden, giving Wymack work for cheap when she had time off from her job in the hospital. Not unlike Nicky and Erik.  
  
“We’ve got a medibot now,” said Neil. “Aaron complains about it all the time.”  
  
Andrew paused at the mention of his brother’s name.  
  
A tight look passed over Abby’s face. “Medibots are good tools, but I wish David would get a human physician. ‘Bots don’t have brains of their own.”  
  
“Don’t they?” asked Bee gently.  
  
Abby sighed and took Bee’s hand. “They have not yet demonstrated creative problem-solving ability on par with a human’s. Or emotions, Mx. Doctorate in Psychology,” she said, smiling at Bee, both wry and fond. Neil looked away, feeling he was intruding, and caught Andrew’s eyes. Andrew shifted and ate more mash.  
  
After breakfast they put their plates in the oddly pyramidal dishwasher (“we found a theme and stuck to it,” Abby said when she saw Neil staring, “people say it’s supposed to represent the rays of the sun, but I think someone just realized triangles have fewer corners to fuss with”) and Neil was bullied into following the path of the powercords up onto a paneled triplet of glass-and-metal triangles on the roof.  
  
“Everything in Eden is solar-powered,” said Bee. They had put on a funny, wide-brimmed hat. Neil had thought it a strange fashion choice, before spending more than a minute with the sun beating down and noticing how it kept Bee’s face and neck shaded. “None of the radioactive leakage that’s all over the cities.”  
  
Neil looked down at the solar panels at their feet. “It looks like a hovertrack.”  
  
Bee laughed. They were a very cheerful person. Neil wasn’t sure why. “That it does. Tell me, Neil, what’s your favorite color?”  
  
Neil’s stomach clenched. He didn’t see why Bee thought they could ask him questions. “I don’t have one. Where’s Andrew?”  
  
“Hiding inside. He’s afraid of heights,” said Bee, in a low, conspiratorial tone.  
  
But Andrew pulled every day to the side of the hoverlane and smoked. “I don’t think he’d want you to tell me that.”  
  
“If you were anyone else, yes.”  
  
Neil didn’t see what him being himself had to do with anything.  
  
Abby had clothes for him when he came back down the outdoor lifter that went up the side of the building—a _house_ , Abby called it, when it was by itself like this. “Not that you don’t look dashing, but sportswear only rejects dirt to a degree.”  
  
Neil was offended. “This can stand up to an entire Exy meet. Or a day of practice without changing.”  
  
“Told you he’d be stubborn,” said Andrew behind him. Neil screwed up his face at him. Andrew dug the corner of his carton of cigarettes into the dip between Neil’s shoulder blades.  
  
“Don’t smoke in the house,” Abby said, exasperated, and shooed Andrew away. Andrew gave a two-fingered salute and strode outside. He called something up to Bee as he went.  
  
“I’m glad he brought you,” said Abby quietly, looking after him. “He mentions you, when he visits.”  
  
Neil had no idea why. “He’s different, here.” More relaxed, he didn’t say. More comfortable. It wasn’t that Andrew no longer was dangerous. It was simply that he’d decided he didn’t need to be, in Eden.  
  
Abby ushered him back into the bedroom he’d shared with Andrew and piled an armful of fabric on him. “Come out when you’re changed,” she said. She left and closed the door without being asked. Feeling rather in a dream, Neil shed his tracksuit and pulled on a pair of buttoning trousers—they felt like denim but a lot thicker—a set of heavy boots three sizes too big, and a faded shirt with the sleeves cut off of it. They didn’t have any homeostasis controls. Neil’s armpits, groin, and chest gathered sweat immediately. He hooked his fingertips under the bottom of his binder and hesitated.  
  
“All right in there?” Abby called through the door.  
  
“I’m fine,” said Neil automatically. Then: “do you have another shirt? A bigger one?”  
  
“I’ll get you one of Bee’s.”  
  
She also produced two wide-brimmed hats like Bee had been wearing, fitted with a wire to make them spring out of little circular packets that fit in the palm of Neil’s hand when they were folded up. “Sunscreen pill,” Abby said once Neil had taken one of the hats, swallowing what looked like a dinner capsule dry.  
  
“No thank you,” said Neil. Non-poisoned breakfast aside, he wasn’t about to start taking medication from people he’d just met.

“You’ll regret that tonight,” said Abby, but she didn’t push. She carried the other capsule with her outside. “Bee! Sunscreen!”  
  
“I don’t need that, I’m Black,” Bee shouted down from the roof.  
  
“You’re the brain doctor, not the body doctor, and I say yes you do!”  
  
“All right, all right.” Bee rode the lift down and took the sunscreen capsule from Abby with a kiss, swallowing it with a hearty gulp from the bottle of water Neil had seen Abby fill from the sink. “I’ve never liked pills. Can’t we do a hydrospray?”  
  
“Pills keep longer and you know it,” said Abby. She shot Neil an exasperated look. “They don’t take care of themselves at all.”  
  
“That’s what you’re for,” said Bee cheerfully.  
  
Andrew appeared around the corner of the house, hands in his pockets, kicking through the underbrush. “Don’t try to get the Exy freak to side with you. He’s got the same problem.”  
  
He came to stand next to Neil. He smelled like smoke. Neil leaned towards him.  
  
“Don’t knock over my tomatoes, Andrew Minyard,” Bee said. Andrew kicked at the ground again, deliberate, but Neil noticed he avoided the greenery and only connected with the soft soil.  
  
Bee and Abby taught Neil how to weed the garden that morning, and then they picked peas, which _did_ have leaves, with Andrew a silent, steady worker beside them. Andrew stripped off his jacket as a concession to the heat, revealing long arm bands that Neil remembered from the wallscreen vids of his Exy stunts. He took neither sunscreen pill nor hat, and Neil watched in amusement as Andrew turned pinker and pinker under the sun.

 It was thirsty work, and dirty. Neil was used to the manicured lawns of city parks, and this was a tangle of vines and leaves and jewel-bright fruit covered all in dirt that smeared up Neil’s arms and darkened the knees of his borrowed trousers. Sweat poured down his neck. His back and thighs ached from crouching for so long. Abby and Bee were interesting to watch, though. They teased and complimented each other in turn, and kept up a steady stream of gossip about people Neil had never heard of but Andrew seemed to know.  
  
The nearby houses spilled people outside them too, who waved and greeted Abby and Bee and their guests. When the sun was at its zenith, Neil watched the next-door neighbors have a quiet conversation and then walk across the narrow, cobbled lane between their houses, carrying a coldbag and a covered plate. Neil tensed. Andrew stopped working and leaned back on his heels.  
  
“We come bringing lunch!” said the shorter of the two people, grinning widely and holding up the plate. Bee and Abby ooh-ed and ah-ed and greeted both people with hugs. They were quick to introduce Andrew, who the two people seemed to know, and Neil, who they didn’t. Except--  
  
“You used to do Exy,” Neil said, standing and frowning at the taller person. He’d not recognized Jean Moreau at first, with their skin darkened from the sun and their hair long, pulled into a ponytail that curled over one shoulder. “You were on the Ravens. With Kevin.”  
  
The other person—who had introduced himself as Jeremy—sucked in a breath and put a hand on Jean’s arm. Jean smiled at him and took the hand in their own instead. “Yes. You are Josten—Neil. You are on a team with Kevin, now.”  
  
Neil had never spoken directly to Jean, but their accent was the same as it was in interviews. “I thought you had died.”  
  
“In a sense, I did. But I, now, reft of that confusion, am lifted up and speeding toward the light.”  
  
“That’s poetry. You’re like Andrew.”  
  
A smile touched the corner of Jean’s mouth. “I know. Andrew won’t admit that we are friends. He just takes my handheld to read the books every time he is here.”  
  
Now that Neil thought about it, he realized none of the people he’d seen, both closely and when he’d watched from under the brim of his borrowed hat going past, had had eyescreens. It made sense that Jean would have removed the program that displayed a “3” over their pupil at all times; Kevin had replaced hirs with an image of an archaic chess piece. But Jean, Abby, Bee…all of them had had the whole lens removed.  
  
Andrew was the only one in Eden with an eyescreen. Neil looked over at him. Andrew stared back, unmoving. But then, Andrew’s eye was green. He was always the only one.  
  
“Perhaps you can get to know each other in a new way,” said Jeremy lightly. He proffered the plate again. “We didn’t bring this to eat it all ourselves, you know.”  
  
The plate contained sandwiches, stuffed with crisp lettuce—Neil was used to it being limp, and found he liked the crunch—bean sprouts, and slices of tomato. “Tomato,” Abby said. “Always tomato here, in the summer. You get used to finding fifty ways to eat it.” She didn’t seem to have an issue with the sandwich despite her teasing tone, for she was the first one finished.

The coldbag contained a jug of something that smelled reminiscent of the citrus stimstick. They passed the jug around, all drinking from the same metal lip. Neil imagined Allison’s comments about it being unsanitary, and then considered the dirt under his fingernails and what she’d say about that. It made a sharpness of mirth rise in his chest.  
  
“Lemonade,” Jeremy explained, when Neil made a face at the flavor.  
  
“It’s very sweet,” said Neil.  
  
Jeremy laughed. Andrew stole the jug from Neil’s hands, condensation making their fingers slip together. The sweat beading on Andrew’s throat as he swallowed looked the same.  
  
 “How long can you stay?” Jeremy asked. Neil jumped as he realized Jeremy was speaking to him. So far everyone had been nice. It was setting Neil on edge, but at the same time, it felt like a long-held tension in him was unwinding, like the long spool of rope Wymack used to mark off the edges of the track when he wanted the wall down.  
  
The question pricked at Neil. Somehow he’d not thought about practice for the entire morning. “I have to go back! I have training.”  
  
Andrew’s hand landed on the back of Neil’s neck. “It’s the day after a game. Nobody’s expecting you to be at the Court. It’s not even open.”  
  
“I’m able to scan in.”  
  
“Sometimes,” said Jean carefully, “A break helps you think better. Space in the brain is just as important as statistics, when it comes to performance.”  
  
Neil had not considered that before.  
  
“How about just a few more hours? Then Andrew can take you back,” Bee offered. Neil sucked his lower lip into his mouth and thought.  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“Great!” Jeremy said. He leapt up and made as if to hug Neil. Neil flinched back, and Andrew’s hand tightened, Andrew shifting Neil behind him. Jeremy held up his hands. “Whoops, I get it. No touching. I’m just excited. It’s not often I get to make new friends.”  
  
“Are you saying you’re getting tired of us?” Abby asked, cocking her hip.  
  
Jeremy’s spluttering apologies were drowned out by Bee’s laughter.

After all the sandwiches were finished, Abby went into the house and came back with thin metal chairs that unfolded with the press of a button. “We’ll have to move them around to stay in the shade,” she told Neil, ushering him into one. Neil was grateful to sit down. He was used to pushing his body to the limit every day, but this type of work was strange to him, and after the break his muscles were stiff and sore. “We haven’t figured out how to temperature modulate them yet.”  
  
The chairs were uncomfortable. They didn’t mold to the contour of Neil’s body the way he was used to. He took off his hat to wipe at his brow.  Jeremy gave an amused snort.  
  
“Your hair’s stuck up,” he said, when Neil looked at him. Neil patted at his head and felt the matted clumps. He decided to forego the hat now that he was in the shade. The faint breeze around his head cooled his temples, felt like a deep breath after a long time. He heard a click to his right and saw Abby taking a picture with her handheld.  
  
“I can delete it,” she said when she saw Neil watching.  
  
Neil hesitated. He’d already had his face plastered across wallscreens nationwide. “It’s okay.”  
  
“Good. I like to take pictures of everyone who comes here,” Abby said. She smiled, and Neil found himself not minding. “Also, you should wear your hair like that every day.”  
  
Andrew grunted, unfolding his own chair beside Neil. Bee shot him a crinkle-eyed look. Andrew stared back blankly.  
  
Sitting didn’t mean relaxation. All of the peas picked that morning, along with the ones Jean and Jeremy brought over to set up beside them (they seemed to have invited themselves over for the rest of the day, which Neil wasn’t sure he liked), had to be taken out of their fibrous pods and dropped into clean bowls. Neil was terrible at it. Abby encouraged him that all he needed was practice, but Neil kept waiting for her to lose patience with his fumbling fingers.  
  
“I wish you’d stay for dinner,” Bee said, when the itch in Neil’s legs became too much to ignore and he started glancing at Andrew in a plea to head back to the city. “Abby’s got the last of the potatoes saved to go with these, with oil.”  
  
Neil looked down at his pitiful bin of shelled peas in surprise. “You eat these?”  
  
“What did you think we spent all that time shelling them for?”  
  
To send to the city, Neil thought. The concept of eating something he himself had grown—not that he had—and prepared and also cooked was strange. Somehow he’d assumed breakfast and lunch had been obtained from a restaurant deeper in Eden he’d had yet to see, flown or biked in like Andrew had taken him. He put a pea on his tongue to keep from having to answer. It wasn’t just the spices. Vegetables themselves had so much more flavor here than he was used to. Eden’s peas were sweet and fresh, nothing like the bitter gooey mess on the Foxes’ diet plan.  
  
Kevin wouldn’t have trouble getting us to eat _these_ , Neil thought.

His stomach felt uncomfortably heavy as he used the three-in-one bathroom unit in the back of the house, leaving Andrew to help Abby and Bee clear up. Two proper food meals in one day was more than Neil had had in a long time. In the polished mirror that folded out along with the sink Neil saw that his face and neck had darkened under the sun. There was a paler line across his forehead where his hat had been. Neil leaned forward, dragging his hair out of the way, to peer at the difference. He’d also gathered a swath of freckles across his nose, which despite the shade offered by the hat was feeling tender.  
  
Allison would fuss about that when she came back. She was always bothering Neil about skin care. Neil didn’t see why it mattered so much. He’d been hired for Exy, and when he needed to make an appearance there was a team of stylists that made over the whole team so they looked like their own older, more attractive cousins.

Andrew pounded on the door. “Hurry up or I’ll leave you here.””  
  
“Is the toilet blocked up again?” Abby asked when Neil re-emerged, giving Neil a look that was part sympathy and part frustration. “Damned thing. I’ll have Roland look at it. He’s got that doctorate in engineering.”  
  
“And now he’s fixing toilets,” said Bee, smiling. They cut their eyes to Andrew, who squinted at them, though Neil wasn’t sure why. “We enjoyed having you here, Neil. Tell Andrew he’s welcome to bring you back any time.”  
  
“I’m right here,” Andrew griped. He bunched a hand in the back of Neil’s shirt. “Get changed so I can get you back to your stupid flight school.”  
  
“Exy,” Neil corrected automatically. It wasn’t the first time Andrew had used a disparaging nickname for the sport. He thanked Bee and Abby and then went to wiggle back into his practice suit, eyeing the window in the back wall and hoping he could convince Andrew to leave from there so he wouldn’t have to suffer the awkwardness of a second round of good-byes.   
  
Andrew announced his presence in the room by throwing his jacket heavily on the bed and sitting to put his boots on. He didn’t bother unfolding the helmet from his pocket—Neil wasn’t sure if it was even in there, anymore.  
  
“Are you going to take me back here?” Neil asked.  
  
Andrew grunted. It was a noncommittal grunt rather than a negative one, so Neil accepted that he’d have to wait to find out.  
  
“I wouldn’t mind. I liked it,” he said, and realized it was true.  
  
“Shut up,” said Andrew. He stood, yanked once on Neil’s sunburnt nose, and swung himself out the window.

 

The blinding lights of a police hovercar greeted Neil and Andrew as they returned to the city. A siren roused to let them know they’d been sighted: Urie’s “I Write Sins.” they were being told to come quietly for questioning. Neil’s stomach sank. Eden had been so strange to him that he’d forgotten to worry about being arrested, but now the fear was back in full force. Andrew squeezed Neil’s wrist. He’d had Neil press behind him on the same seat again instead of pulling out the extra, and so he must have felt Neil go tense.  
  
“Don’t say anything,” Andrew told him, as he slowed to follow the waving arms of the officer. “I’ll handle it.”  
  
“Oh, you’ve done so well at avoiding incarceration before.”  
  
Andrew elbowed him in the stomach. Neil cursed and gripped the bike with his knees to keep from falling off.  
  
They offered up blank faces as they were yanked from the bike and marched into the police tower. Andrew twitched at the physical contact until Neil shoved himself between Andrew and the officer controlling him, taking the brunt of the force on his own back. The pair of officers shoving them forward shouted back and forth, robotic voices from their helmets that mixed into nonsense by the time they hit Neil’s ears. He tried to make himself look small and unthreatening. It helped that one of those things, at least, was true.  
  
Wymack was hovering back and forth by the doors to the holding cell. The blood drained back into his face when he saw Andrew and Neil. “What the _fuck_ do you two think you were doing?”  
  
“Hoverbiking,” said Neil. Andrew swore, giving Neil a murderous look, which Neil ignored. “Why am I being restrained?”  
  
“Because you took a fucking convict outside the city limits! You’re under high security, you fuckwit!” Neil flinched back from Wymack’s rage, and Wymack attempted to soften his expression. Andrew rocked closer to Neil, his wristcuffs sparking a warning. “Goddammit, Josten, how many times are you going to get yourself killed? And you, Minyard. I know this was your idea.”  
  
“Citizen, we recommend you keep yourself calm,” said one of the officers through their helmet. Wymack glared at them but relented. _For now_ , was the promise in his crossed arms.  
  
“He’s an _ex_ -convict,” Neil said. “Don’t blame him for this.”  
  
“I don’t need you defending me,” Andrew hissed. Neil elected to ignore him.  
  
“Listen,” Neil said, staring into the visor of the officer who had spoken to Wymack. “I asked Andrew to take me outside. I was stressed with all the extra practices the Foxes have done lately, and I needed a vacation. You can’t arrest him.”  
  
“Convicts are not permitted outside of city limits,” said the other officer.  
  
Neil switched his glare to them. “ _Ex_ -convict, get it right. If you can’t distinguish basic things like that, then you might as well stop trying to know about the law and get us both some stimsticks. We’re tired.”  
  
Wymack dropped his face into his hands and groaned. Neil turned to see Andrew regarding him with his lips parted. When he noticed Neil was watching he closed his mouth and smoothed his expression.  
  
“I’m sorry, officer,” Wymack said, in an approximation of a respectful tone. “These two are my responsibility. I can _guarantee_ that it won’t happen again.” He said this last directly to Neil’s face. Neil stared back blankly.  
  
The officer shook their head. “This is not the first offense for the convict.”  
  
“ _Ex_ —” Neil stared hotly. Andrew drove his shoulder into Neil’s chest so hard Neil doubled over coughing.  
  
“I know,” said Wymack. He tugged at the top of his collar. Neil had never seen him with it fastened all the way up. “Believe me, I know. Officer, I wouldn’t ask you for this, but there’s a match in two days and they’ll kick us out of the running if one of my racers gets arrested now. Do you follow Exy?” His eyes flicked to the officer’s wrist. So he too had seen the orange Foxes bracelet the officer wore.  
  
Neil held his breath. The reality of the situation was starting to trickle back in. He imagined being dragged away and locked in a neck cuff, shoved in a stasis cell and banned from ever setting foot on an Exy track again. He started to get dizzy.  
  
“It’s just that I want to get Neil back to his teammates before they get any more worried,” said Wymack, his voice taking a wheedling note. “Kevin’s been so upset about hir favorite boardist going missing.”  
  
The officer hesitated. They turned to their partner—Neil knew they must be communicating privately through their helmets—and after a few minutes their partner stomped away down the hall. When they turned back their posture was looser.  
  
“Kevin,” they said. “That’d be Kevin Day?”  
  
“Oh, yes,” said Wymack. Neil thought his surprise was a tad overdone. “Sie looks out for Neil, you know. Seasoned star to the up-and-coming, and all that.”  
  
Andrew snorted quietly. He turned it into a sneeze when the officer swiveled their head.  
  
“My niece is a fan,” said the officer. From the excited twitch of their fingers, Neil thought the niece wasn’t the only one. “She would hate to see the Foxes compromised, especially when you’ve done so well this season. Do you think…if we returned Day’s, ah, favorite you said? Sie could be convinced to contribute an autograph? For my nice, you understand.”  
  
“And Andrew,” Neil said quickly. Wymack’s face tightened, his smile becoming somewhat wild. The officer glanced Neil’s way.  
  
“I suppose it could be overlooked, if he was just accompanying you. It wasn’t his idea, you said?”  
  
“Not at all,” said Neil. “In fact,” his throat closed up but he forced the sound through, “I’d like to take Andrew with me every time I need a vacation, in the future. I don’t trust anyone else to bike off the city streets.”  
  
Maintenance of public roadways was one of the most contentious bits of police jurisdiction. Neil implying that city streets were much better than those outside made the officer puff up their chest. “If he’s with you, well. For the sake of your team. My niece,” they added, visor looking back between Wymack and Neil. Wymack smiled. Neil swore he could hear Wymack’s teeth creaking from the strain. Andrew glowered but at least he was silent about it.  
  
“Now that I think about it, I’m not sure you _did_ leave the city limits,” said the officer. “We’ve been updating our software for the Rim, to make it more sensitive. You might just have passed too close.”  
  
Two promised autographs, three tickets to the next Foxes meet, and a permit for supervised outside-city parole later (Neil was most astonished by the last one: the officer must have money riding on the Foxes doing well, if they were so willing to grant Neil Andrew on his vacations, “for his mental health”), Wymack had Andrew and Neil bundled in the back of his modified hovercar driving back to the Court. They had to leave Andrew’s bike behind.  
  
“I don’t know if I can get you another one,” said Wymack, when Andrew crossed his arms. Neil was surprised; he hadn’t thought the man would realize Andrew was sulking. “That was a shit fuck of a stunt you two pulled. Be glad there’s the threat of imminent murder over Neil’s head or I’d kill you both myself.”  
  
Andrew looked up sharply. “Murder?”  
  
“Ravens shit,” said Wymack, gesturing rudely to a driver as he cut them off. “Nothing big, just Tetsuji’s usual posturing over the wallscreens, but then we couldn’t find Neil—or you. Everyone’s at the Court. I don’t think any of us have slept, so put that on your conscience, Josten. Minyard, I know you don’t have one.”

An unfamiliar discomfort curdled in Neil’s belly. He hadn’t thought that his teammates would care if he left for a weekend, except maybe Kevin, for the lost practice time. Blinking away the mental image of Matt’s upset face, he huddled further into the seat. Andrew seemed disinclined to speak anymore, staring out the window, so the rest of the ride was broken only by Wymack’s one-sided shouted conversations with the other vehicles.

Kevin opened the door to the Court before Wymack could finish punching in the code. “Thank fuck,” sie said, face pale. “Neil, don’t you ever do that again. You could’ve been kicked off the track.”  
  
“He could’ve _died_ , Kevin,” said Dan from behind hir, exasperated, but Neil shook his head to cut her off. The rest of them didn’t understand what Exy meant, the way he and Kevin did. Neil held Kevin’s gaze and stepped deliberately through the door.  
  
“Nothing is going to keep me from being a Fox,” he said. Kevin shuddered and slumped, propping hir fist on the wall. Wymack clapped hir on the shoulder on his way past.  
  
“Neil!” Matt ran up and seized Neil’s arm. Their hair was gel-less and unkempt, Neil noticed, with another pang of that strange discomfort. “I thought for sure you weren’t coming back. I’m so glad to see you, shit.” They squeezed Neil’s arm again and then, with obvious reluctance, let go. “Why the fuck did you bring _him_ , though?”  
  
“All questions can be answered later,” Wymack snapped. He was checking the brace around Aaron’s knee. If Aaron had stayed up all night, it would be bothering him. Somehow Neil hadn’t expected Aaron to be included in “everyone” who had stayed up to wait for him. Neil moved uncomfortably further in and saw Nicky and Erik beside Aaron, breaking into relieved smiles when they saw Neil alive and well. Neil dodged Nicky’s hug.

Aaron stiffened. Neil looked over and saw him locking eyes with Andrew, both of them still as the pillars that held up the walls on either side of the hallway. After a long minute, Aaron scoffed and pivoted on his good foot to turn his back. He shook out of Wymack’s hold and limped off towards the bathrooms.  
  
“Medibot!” Wymack shouted after him. Aaron extended his middle finger up over his head without turning around. Wymack dragged his hand through his hair and muttered something uncomplimentary about athletes and dramatics.

Andrew tapped his foot. Neil could tell he wanted a cigarette, but the police had confiscated both his pack and his lighter. When he spoke, it wasn’t to acknowledge he’d seen his brother at all. “Walker and Reynolds finally leave you?”  
  
“They’re ordering food for everyone,” said Dan, giving Andrew a look of dislike. “Coach said Neil was unhurt, but he didn’t say he was fed. You don’t get anything.”  
  
Andrew shrugged. Neil opened his mouth to protest Dan’s rudeness, and was stayed by Andrew’s flat look. He’d give Andrew some of his own food, Neil decided. If Andrew would eat it. He’d discovered during the few times Andrew had swung by a restaurant on the way home that Andrew was an astonishingly picky eater.  
  
It turned out he didn’t have to. Despite Dan’s words, there was a box of takeout delivered to Minyard, Andrew Joseph, along with the ones for the rest of them. Allison tugged at Neil’s hair when she saw him again and proclaimed she was glad she wouldn’t have to break in another rookie. Renee said nothing, but her smile was warm, and again the discomfort in Neil’s stomach sharpened. Quick on its heels was anger. He hadn’t _asked_ his teammates to care about him. So what if he’d gone away for a day and a half? Neil was experienced at surviving. And he’d had Andrew with him. He’d been fine.  
  
“Neil’s like Kevin, he doesn’t have a middle name,” Nicky was saying as Erik took the boxes of food to pass them out. “I keep trying to get him to pick one, but he won’t.”  
  
“Because your suggestions are shit,” said Allison.  
  
“Oh, sorry, what was your middle name again? Gee, you know, when I have kids I can’t imagine naming them after something like, oh, the second-largest exporter of robotics parts in the Western—”  
  
They devolved into amicable squabbling. Neil was glad for the excuse to ignore Andrew’s eyes on him. His middle name was one of the few things he’d held back from the government registrar, and he didn’t want Andrew deciding to investigate him further.  
  
The food tasted bland after what Neil had eaten in Eden. He poked at it, annoyed at himself. Two fancy meals and he was turning up his nose at calories? So what if everything in his curry was rehydrated. It would fuel him for another handful of hours, and that was all it needed to do.

Something flashed by Neil’s ear. He stuck up his hand and caught a small packet of clear gel.  
  
“Put it on your face,” Allison said, when Neil looked at her to see why she’d tried to give him a black eye. “I see that sunburn. This is the good shit, top-of-the-line nano-repair, so use it like you’re the rich fucker you are.”  
  
“Thank you,” said Neil automatically. He already knew he wouldn’t.  
  
“Got to look after our Neil,” Dan said, smiling at him. Neil wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so he stuffed his mouth with his tasteless curry instead.

* * *


	4. II-2

It was four days before Andrew could get his bike back. Neil suspected that Nicky had offered a hand in keeping the thing from a recycler, whether he’d told Andrew or not. It wasn’t until Neil was gripping Andrew’s waist again, thundering out of the city limits towards Eden, that he realized how afraid he’d been that he wouldn’t be able to come back.  
  
Missing a place other than an Exy track was strange. It was not the only strange thing.

Neil’s brain, accustomed to the pattern of necessity-hunger-survive, prodded tentatively at Eden’s new ideas. At first it rejected them, anger from past hurt, cringing from an offering hand in the memory of a blow; and then it absorbed them greedily, guzzling sunlight and honest, joyful community with a hunger that made Neil dizzy. He was a glutton for it as before he had only been for Exy, swallowing Abby’s smiles and Bee’s gentle teasing whole, basking in every kind word tossed unselfconsciously towards him in the greenness of the gardens and pressing nose-to-plasma-glass for more. And Eden gave. Gave without asking for him, without demanding his flesh or money in return, aside from what he freely gave them. As if such things were normal. As if they were expected.  
  
They were all delighted to reward his interest. And the questions he had about Andrew, and their weekend hosts, though Neil did not ask them.

“Bee was Andrew’s therapist when he got out of containment,” another of Eden’s inhabitants, a man with high cheekbones—the engineer, Roland. “Neither one of them will say anything more than that. No, like this,” he said, showing Neil again how to fit the next triangle onto the solar panel they were repairing.  
  
Neil flipped the piece and tried again. This time it snapped into place. He thought of Bee telling him Andrew was afraid of heights. About it not mattering, since it was Neil. “You all seem to know Andrew, though.”  
  
“He visits often enough. And I know him better than most, which still isn’t much. Biblically, as some people would say.”  
  
It took a while for Neil to work out Roland’s meaning. He wondered if Roland had ever been scared of Andrew’s eye, like Neil had been. He wondered if Roland knew that it wasn’t the green eye that was more dangerous. “I don’t think I’ve seen anyone read a Bible.”  
  
“Maybe they should.”  
  
Neil wasn’t sure about that. He didn’t think reading a book would have stopped his father’s minions from hurting him. He thought of his mother setting rare and precious burning-wick candles between them on the hub of the hovercar, Friday nights. “I think my mom had something else she used to read. Sometimes. Only when I was younger.”  
  
It was the first time he’d thought of his mother without pain since she had died.  
  
Roland fit the next panel into place. He made a pleased noise when it slotted in, as if he hadn’t been doing it right every time, while Neil fumbled. “Jean might have it. They’re our library, you know? They get frustrated that they don’t have enough saved, but it’s better than they give themselves credit for. They even have recordings of some of the stories I remember my grandmothers telling me, when I was too young to appreciate them.  It’s funny, that your name is Josten, and you’re Andrew’s rabbit who lies. I asked Andrew if you’d been named after Jistu.”  
  
“I’m not a rabbit. I’m a Fox.”  
  
Roland smiled at him. “Whichever you are, you’re Andrew’s. Once Andrew claims someone, he doesn’t give them away.”  
  
Neil wondered about Aaron. Though it seemed that Aaron had abandoned Andrew as much as Andrew had abandoned him.  
  
Roland slid the next panel into place, content to give Neil the space to grapple with the concept. “There we go,” he murmured to the panel, and then Neil felt the edges of his own panel slip through his fingers, cutting a jagged line across the meat of his palm. It was nothing, but Roland’s voice played back in his mind warped and deepening, and now it was his father’s voice, _there we go, Junior, tell your mother don’t cry or she’ll get one too_ and the sharpness of the pain in his hand was grounding, because pain was always duller in the memory, across Neil’s abdomen in thin white scars, and Neil would be fine in a moment, he just had to focus.  
  
“You’re bleeding,” said Roland, frowning, and Neil lifted his hand before his eyes, watched the red, red blood like juice trickle slowly down the cup of his palm to his wrist. If he had cut but a mote deeper, he would be able to see the inner workings of his hand as he curled his fingers…  
  
“I’m fine,” he said, slowly through the rising water. “I’ve got a medikit.”  
  
“You don’t sound fine,” said Roland, and he moved and Neil stilled, let him stand breath-distance away because his head was flying off and he was fine.  
  
“Neil.”  
  
Andrew was there.  
  
Neil didn’t know where he had come from, or how he had gotten there without Neil noticing. He looked away from his steadily throbbing hand to see Roland pressed back against the box of solar panels, legs akimbo, and Andrew’s face close to his own. Andrew took his hand. Neil hissed at the pain. The divot between Andrew’s eyebrows grew deeper.  
  
“You idiot,” said Andrew. Neil watched with mild interest as Andrew tucked the fabric of his arm band down over his palm to press to Neil’s gash. He sent Roland scurrying for the medikit and took it from him when he returned, cleaning and spraying Skin-Gro™ over the cut with clinical efficiency. He pressed Neil’s hand back to his chest when he was finished, unpeeling his own fingers from around it and returning them to his pockets. Unsupported, Neil let the hand fall down to his side.  
  
“What was it?” asked Andrew. Neil shook his head. Andrew tightened his lips and balled his hands up into fists in his pockets. Neil could see the shape imprinted through the denim.  
  
“My father,” said Neil eventually. He wanted to look away but Andrew’s eyes wouldn’t let him. He scratched at the new skin over his palm and said, “He used to say, ‘there we go,’ when….and Roland…” Neil focused on the uncomfortable itch of his healing palm and forced the smog clouds in his mind to part. “I was surprised. It doesn’t always happen like that.” Maybe because he’d just been thinking about his mother?  
  
Andrew regarded him with a gaze that made Neil feel he was being x-rayed. He squirmed and tamped down the desire to run. Or to lean closer. Somehow they both seemed a reasonable course of action.  
  
“I don’t like the word ‘please,’” said Andrew, low-pitched voice quieter than a whisper. “Don’t use it.”  
  
“Okay,” Neil said.  
  
Abby ran up, a large messenger bag thumping against the side of her legs. “Neil! Are you all right?”  
  
“I’m fine,” Neil insisted. His head was coming back in bits and pieces.  
  
Abby held out her hand for Neil’s anyway, eyebrows raised. Reluctantly Neil showed her the doctored cut. Abby pressed along the new skin, examining the edges, and made Neil open and close his fist several times before she was satisfied.  
  
“Thank you,” she said to Andrew. To Neil, she said: “You’re covered in blood. You need some fluids and some sugar. And a sink.”  
  
Neil snapped his head up as a fourth person hobbled up, leaning against the boxes beside Roland. They were using a discarded bit of plastic pipe as a crutch.  
  
“Not to rush you,” said the person, in a whining tone that pretended to be polite. “But my foot?”  
  
Neil saw that he person’s foot was twisted at a strange angle, covered in bits of concrete dust. Broken, obviously. Injuries to the feet and legs were the most dangerous because they limited your ability to run. Or to race. Riko had picked well, when he’d chosen where to hurt Kevin.  
  
“Sorry,” said Abby, flashing the person a strained smile. To Neil and Andrew she said, “it’s only me here; it can get a bit hectic. Andrew, make him drink something sweet.” She turned and went over to the broken-foot person, and pointed insistently at the ground until they let Roland help them sit and handed over their foot. The bag over her shoulder seemed to contain a number of medical supplies.  
  
The dried blood on Neil’s arm was starting to itch as badly as the new skin. He scratched at it to flake it off. Andrew snorted and slapped his hand away.  
  
“Stop that,” he said, mocking. “Or next time I’ll let you bleed out.”  
  
“No you won’t. If you’d wanted to kill me you would’ve pushed me off your hoverbike the first day.”  
  
“Or locked you outside in the radiation sweep.”  
  
“Stuck a poisoned hydrospray in my neck.”  
  
“Hung you out in the sun to shrivel up like a snack tab wrapper.”  
  
“Suffocated me with the pillow while I slept.”  
  
For some reason, Roland was laughing.  
  
  
That night Neil couldn’t sleep. He crept out the window, followed by a silent Andrew, and wandered around Eden’s shadows until he found the edge of the settlement. Even a place as dedicated to sustainability as this generated a small amount of waste too big or complicated for personal recyclers, and that waste built up. There was a steep cliff that dropped into a pit containing byproducts, broken things. Neil settled himself on the edge and dangled his feet. Andrew kept a few paces behind him.  
  
There were, in fact, two ‘bots in Eden’s whole off-grid operation. Ancient clunkers of garbage-sifters, clumsily fitted for solar and picking sluggishly over the shifting mountains of garbage spread out before them. Neil watched as one of them extended a retractable tube and sucked up a plastic container, melting it down to a superdense globule. In the silent darkness it made a tremendous noise.  
  
“Came to visit your family?” Andrew said, nodding to the ‘bot.  
  
Neil shivered and wrapped the edges of his borrowed shirt around himself. “I’m not a wastebot.”  
  
“No. Just a murderer’s son,” said Andrew. He shrugged out his jacket and held it out to Neil.  
  
“I don’t need that,” said Neil.  
  
Andrew threw the jacket over Neil’s head. Neil flailed to get out of it, managing with much twisting and pulling to get it around his shoulders. It smelled so much like Andrew that despite himself Neil found himself relaxing.  
  
“Do you come here for Roland?” Neil asked.  
  
There was a gusty sigh from behind him. The warm weight of Andrew dropped along Neil’s side, cross-legged on the edge. His fingers twitched for a cigarette; he remembered at the same time Neil did that they were in his jacket, and held out a hand. Neil fumbled for the box but held it away. Andrew slapped his wrist. Neil handed the box over and then waited until Andrew paused, staring at it, to give him the lighter. Andrew unfurled a leg to kick Neil’s ankle. Across the waste pit, one of the ‘bots picked up what looked like part of a hovercar, sending a small avalanche of garbage scree down the side of a mound.

“What are you afraid of?” said Andrew.  
  
The world, thought Neil. Police officers and cameras, injuries that would shatter him and render him unfit to ride a hoverboard, his back to an open door, death. His father, so recently dead but not forgotten.

“I’m not afraid,” he said.  
  
Andrew blew a stream of smoke into Neil’s face. “Liar.”  
  
Neil’s eyes watered and burned from the ash. He blinked them shut for several seconds to soothe them. “You know everything that’s in my file.”  
  
Andrew grunted. He turned the cigarette box over in his hands. “If you tell Roland to stop, he will.”  
  
“I like learning about the solar panels.”  
  
“ _Liar_. Second demerit.”  
  
Neil felt a tug in his chest like the slow unfurling of a cloth. “It passes the time. I can ask Bee instead, if you want me to.”  
  
Andrew snorted. “You’re an idiot. Go inside, this is fucking boring.” He brushed off his pants, stood, and offered Neil a hand.

* * *

The semifinals match was against the Trojans, a team that had utterly decimated the Foxes the last time they’d gone wheel-to-wheel. Kevin rallied from what had become hir usual pall of greyish panic to tell them all how badly they’d have their asses handed to them if they didn’t step up. Sie and Dan had a shouting match in the middle of the track that lasted half an hour. At the twenty-minute mark Allison dug into her pocket for a bar of stimsticks and started snapping them off to hand around. Even Wymack took one, leaving Aaron and Neil the only to refuse.  
  
“Some of us have things to do,” Aaron shouted when it looked like Dan had gotten her second wind. He leaned forward to pound on his front wheel, making static pop and crackle. Neil’s own hand tingled in sympathetic pain. The more time he spent with Andrew, the less the twins looked alike. Aaron’s expressions were so obvious, so dramatic.  
  
“Practice is more important than your booty call,” Allison said, prompting a rude gesture from Aaron that made Renee frown disapprovingly.  
  
“This isn’t practice, this is some kind of fucked-up theatre,” said Aaron. Neil knew he meant Kevin and Dan, but his neck prickled as he glanced at the outer Court walls. A new fleet of many-armed securitybots swarmed the perimeter, the obviousness of their scrutiny splintering Neil’s focus. None of the others seemed to care, and Neil had to wonder if they too were being accosted by signed and independent media busybodies asking him about the inevitable leaked footage every day, or if it were just him. Someone yesterday had asked him if he’d fallen out of what should have been a routine noseslide because of the pressure of possibly battling the Ravens in the finals.  
  
“I’m not worried about the Ravens except for how badly their Court is going to stink,” Neil had snapped, and then ducked around a knot of tourists to lose himself in the department store behind them. He found himself wishing for the calm of Eden; the neighbors there were constant gossips, but only asked about things like Neil’s favorite fruit or how well he was learning to use the fertilizer machine, and backed off when he didn’t feel like answering.

Neil talked big to the press (bigger than Wymack would like), but the stress what the Ravens might pull was having visible repercussions in the way the team was performing, a dangerous trend before the semifinals. Matt was taking it the hardest. Neil overheard Renee telling Dan that she thought Matt wasn’t sleeping, and had seen them asking Erik to double-check that the securitybots were functioning at prime capacity. Dan scoffed.  
  
“The sooner they learn there’s more danger in life than not having the newest designer sneakers, the better for us all,” she said, a furrow pressing between her eyebrows. Neil thought that was rather unfair, as Matt showed concern for many things other than fancy sneakers—so many things it was exhausting to Neil to imagine caring about—but Dan had been acting irritable around Matt for the past two weeks. Neil hoped she would get over it soon. It wasn’t helping with the general tension, and Matt was starting to gain a perpetual air of having been kicked in the gut.

 

Andrew took him back to Eden two weekends later, stealing him from the midst of frantic extra practices and making Kevin swear mightily when Neil hopped on the back of the hoverbike. Neil had difficulty speaking of anything but the upcoming semifinals, especially once he found Abby an interested listener (he supposed her time working with the team might account for it) and was describing the finer points of Renee’s backflip into Dan’s outstretched baton arm when there was a knock on the door.  
  
“Finally,” said Andrew. He was clicking through a handheld at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of what Bee had called “chocolate” but which didn’t taste anything like the chocolate-flavored snack tabs Nicky sucked on at practice. Neil had wrinkled his nose at the first sip and given his cup to Andrew, earning him a sneer. Bee had taken it in stride. Neil was starting to think that even a freak radiation storm wouldn’t overturn their omnipresent smile.  
  
“Sorry to bother you,” said the person at the door. They peered around Abby’s shoulders and into the house, which Neil considered very rude. “Pat’s been coughing since yesterday, and I was hoping Abby could come take a look—Oh! Andrew!”  
  
Andrew had gone pale. He stood from the table in a violent twist of motion and strode to the back room. Neil watched him go, debating whether or not he should follow. Bee shook their head and Neil reluctantly stayed.  
  
Abby cleared her throat. “Neil, this is Patrick Higgins. He lives down the way. Patrick, this is Neil. He’s a friend of Andrew’s. He’s visiting.”  
  
“The Exy player,” said Higgins, holding out a hand for Neil to shake. Neil didn’t. After an awkward moment, Higgins stuck his hand back in his pocket. “Right. Um. I’d come back later, but Pat—that’s Patrick Jr.,” he explained to Neil, with a flash of smile Neil didn’t return, “He’s not used to being sick, and he’s scared. Abby?”  
  
“On my way,” Abby said. She walked up to Neil and stood there until Neil realized she wanted the cabinet behind him and jumped out of the way. Abby withdrew a rectangular bag that she slung over her shoulder and paused so Bee could kiss her out the door before hurrying outside after an agitated Higgins. Neil reached out to close the cabinet after she’d gone. Abby had left it open in her haste.

“She never remembers to do that,” said Bee behind him.  
  
“Why doesn’t Andrew like Higgins?” Neil asked, staring at the cabinet doors. They had a strange pattern of curving lines, only visible from this close. Neil followed one of the lines with a finger.  
  
Bee sighed. “When Eden started it was not the way it is now. The initial idea was for a rehabilitation center. Higgins worked bringing people in. We only had a few people, and for only a few months—we realized we had to lay a lot more foundation before we’d be able to do anything large-scale. Higgins decided he liked the atmosphere out here enough to stay.”  
  
“Andrew was one of those people,” said Neil, filling in the obvious gap. He remembered the first time he’d heard Andrew quote a verse. It seemed so long ago. “Jean was another?”  
  
“Yes,” said Bee. They sounded surprised. “There were three others, but they…didn’t find this lifestyle suited them. They were taken back to the city.”  
  
Neil pressed his fingertip into the hard surface of the cabinet. He didn’t like the way Andrew had closed off at the sight of Higgins. If Neil didn’t know that Andrew wasn’t afraid of anything, he would have called it fear. “I’m going to go see Andrew now.”  
  
“Okay,” said Bee. Neil expected more platitudes when he turned around, but Bee only pressed Andrew’s now-lukewarm cup of chocolate into his hands and stepped out of his way. Neil eyed the brown surface of the drink with a faint sense of uselessness. He wished he had a thermo-cup so he could warm it up again.  
  
He kicked the door to the back room with his foot. “Andrew?”  
  
“Fuck off, Bee,” Andrew said. There was a creak, like the bed settling, and then footsteps. The door slid open and Neil found himself centimeters from Andrew’s face. “Neil.”  
  
“Your mom should’ve taught you manners,” said Neil, holding up the cup. Andrew’s eyes flicked down to it and then back up to Neil’s.  
  
“I never had a mom,” Andrew said. He stood back and let Neil come in, collapsing onto the bed with another squeak that made Neil want to claw at his ears. Neil set the chocolate down on the windowsill and leaned against the wall beside it.  
  
“So, Higgins,” said Neil.

Andrew swore and turned on his side so he was facing away. “I’m going to kill Bee.”  
  
“Plasma guns are less messy than knives,” Neil advised him. He scratched absently at one of the scars under his shirt. “If you never had a mom how come Aaron still talks about her?” Not much, and only while sleep-deprived, but still.  
  
“Fuck you,” said Andrew. He flipped back around so he could glare in the direction of Neil’s kneecaps. His hair fell over his face. Neil had the urge to brush it back. He curled his hands into fists instead and hid them behind his back.  
  
“I was named after my father. I didn’t…respond to the name they gave me, so they mostly called me ‘Junior,’” he said. He wasn’t sure why; but he needed something to balance it, after learning something so personal about Andrew, so abruptly, and without Andrew’s permission. The information Neil had found online had just said ‘rehabilitation facility.’ His nails digging into his palms became painful. “Looks like Higgins did the same with his son.”  
  
“We are not talking about this,” Andrew said. He sat up and surged to his feet, caging Neil in. Neil willed his heartrate to stop racing and gazed back into his eyes, meeting the hazel and the green with equal calm.  
  
“Why do you come back here?” Neil wanted to know. “If it hurts so much. There’s always the farms if you need to see real sunlight.”  
  
Andrew’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Why would I expect an adrenaline junkie like you to have a clue?”  
  
“Try me.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Okay.” Neil released his fists and let his arms fall to his sides, limp. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”  
  
Andrew eyed him, suspicious, and then withdrew to snatch the up the cup of chocolate. He took a long drink, grimacing at the temperature, and replaced the cup on the sill with the exaggerated care that let Neil knew he wanted to smash it. “Talk about something else.”  
  
“Yesterday at practice, Kevin—”  
  
“Not Exy.”  
  
Bee knocked on the door before Neil could come up with another topic, asking if the two of them wanted to help with the garden again. This time Andrew answered in the affirmative and went out into the house proper. Neil followed.

  
  
It was hard to imagine that Eden had once been something akin to a prison. It was nothing like the empty, three-by-two-meter stasis cells Neil had come to fear. Residents of the other houses spilled out onto the cobbled paths, chatting and greeting Neil as if he were someone interesting—and _not_ for his parentage, which was even stranger. And they all were eager to teach Neil things.  
  
An old woman with gnarled hands and sharp eyes had Neil running all over the settlement one day, emptying water filters. A person with greying hair and an arm in a sling spent an enthusiastic hour describing the angle of the sun at different times of the year. A man with the largest nose Neil had ever seen spent a memorable afternoon attempting to teach Neil how to knit, which Neil didn’t see the point of. If he needed a blanket he’d just throw enough scrap fabric into the recycler for the credits. Or buy one with the impressive salary Allison kept bothering him to use.  
  
“That’s the point,” the man tried to explain, his ruddy face patient. “Out here we don’t have things like that. It makes you appreciate where things come from, and understand what you need--and what you don’t.”  
  
Neil remembered huddling in the passenger seat of a dingy hovercar, throat parched, while his mother told him they wouldn’t get to the next public well for another sixteen hours. He thought he knew perfectly well what people needed. And it wasn’t to spend time making things that could be obtained for a bare fraction of the time or effort.  
  
Neil spent the ride back with Andrew feeling the bumpy fuzz of the pitiful product of his labors, curled in the hand wrapped around Andrew’s waist. It was strange to think that he’d taken useless strings and put them together into something that—well, it wouldn’t be useful, but if he were more practiced, it might have been. It felt something like pride.

 

Semifinals happened the Trojans' home city, because the Foxhole Court was too small for such a big event. As the Foxes came out of the DNA scanner they were handed rebreathers. Security explained that the ambient air pollution was so high that rebreathers were required _inside_ the city limits as well. Neil fingered the clear rubber triangle and wondered if he would ever lose the heartstopping fear of the scanner. It seemed an impossible dream every time it passed him through as Neil Josten, real living human and professional Exy racer. Government routing number and all.  
  
Wymack’s speech about decorum was met with the usual absentminded grunting. Neil wasn’t sure why Wymack bothered. From what Neil had seen, the Foxes did as they pleased.  
  
The Trojans’ captain was a cyclist, and between her, Kevin, and Renee, the crowd screamed themselves hoarse. Neil had met Laila Dermott at a charity function the Foxes had been forced to go to. He was discomfited to learn that she remembered his dislike of feature films.  
  
“I’d never call you gentle, but you made some good points. Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you. We’ll go easy," she said while shaking his hand, grin wide. She had a scarf wrapped around her head and neck. Neil wondered if it was stiffening fabric for use as a helmet, and suppressed a wince at the thought of being so enclosed.  
  
“No you won’t,” said Dan cheerfully. Laila laughed.  
  
“No we won’t,” she agreed. “C’mon, let’s do some Exy!”  
  
The Trojans came down hard and fast, which would have been surprising given their genial natures if Neil hadn’t spent the last weeks reviewing Trojans footage. Neil narrowly missed being slammed into the wall by a Trojan boardist on his first circuit around the track.  
  
“That should’ve been a foul,” Allison griped when Neil came off, switching with Kevin. Neil shook his head, too out of breath to speak for a moment.  
  
“She was still ten centimeters away,” Neil said, once he could. “She was just _only_ ten centimeters away.” Nicky clucked sympathetically as he checked the emitters on the bottom of Neil’s board. Neil had a habit of riding too close to the track, born of the days when all he could practice on were poor nearly-burned-out community tracks, and it was hell on the electrics.  
  
“They don’t break the rules but they know how far they can push them,” said Wymack. He crossed his arms, handheld dangling off the side of his hoverchair. “Kevin, don’t you fucking dare—ah fuck, at least sie landed it,” he grumbled, as Kevin leapt over the Trojan bladist trying to edge past hir. Outside the plasma-glass, the crowd was deafening. Aaron winced and clapped his hands over his ears. He’d gotten his internal hearing chips updated a few days before, and was still getting used to the levels. Erik leaned over and twitched his fingers by Aaron’s head to turn them down.  
  
 “Thanks,” Aaron muttered, not looking at him. Nicky shook his head and laid a hand on Erik’s arm.  
  
“It’s been years, Aaron,” Nicky said. “Could you at least try?”  
  
“No,” said Aaron, and dropped down off the other side of his bike so Nicky would stop trying to talk to him. To Neil’s surprise, Nicky actually did, turning instead to talk to Allison about the twist that the Trojan bladist had just turned off a collapsing rail. Dan swerved in front of him to keep him from passing the baton to Laila.  
  
“Atta girl!” Wymack shouted, tapping the plasma-glass. It wobbled in ripples out from his fingertips, adding to the noise with a wavering hum. Neil adjusted his knee pads to keep his hands from shaking with adrenaline.  
  
The score was close. In the last minute Matt pulled ahead and scraped the necessary points by twisting to approach the finish line backside and grabbing the tail of their board with the hand not holding the baton. Kevin’s scream of triumph was wild. Sie and Dan grabbed at each other, embracing, and Dan danced them around in a staggering two-step.  
  
Renee decelerated off the track and skidded to a halt just in time to catch Allison rocketing off behind her, and dip her nearly to the floor in a kiss. Nicky cheered and pounded her on the back with his fists until Renee let Allison up, both of them grinning and flushed.  
  
“Holy shit,” said Matt, accepting Erik’s helping hand down from his board. “Holy shit we’re going to finals.”  
  
“Good job, Boyd,” said Wymack with a rare, brilliant grin. “Good job all of you. The Trojans are a bastard of an opponent.”  
  
“And we beat them!” Dan shrieked, releasing Kevin to throw her arms around Wymack. Wymack grunted, his eyebrows shooting up, and tentatively patted her on the back.  
  
“Overexcited much?” said Aaron. “We’re not at the finals yet.”  
  
Neil scowled at him. The racing leap in his own chest lost some of its verve under Aaron’s unimpressed tone. “You don’t have to be here if you don’t want to.”  
  
“Yes I do,” said Aaron. He yanked his bike down the corridor headed to the outside. Matt came up behind Neil and, waving so Neil would know to expect it, laid a hand on Neil’s shoulder.  
  
“Don’t mind him, he couldn’t show excitement if his life depended on it,” Matt said. “He’ll probably do a whole choreographed victory dance when none of us are looking.”  
  
“Whatever,” Neil said, the joy rising in a rush again now that Matt was here to remind him of it. “We’re going to finals. You were amazing, that last trick?”  
  
“Thanks,” said Matt, grinning. “Not too shabby yourself, Josten. Hey, we’re all going out to celebrate tomorrow once we get back home. Even Aaron. Come with us for once, yeah?”  
  
 “I can’t,” said Neil automatically.  
  
Matt tugged lightly at his shoulder. “Coach is giving us a day off—you know he always does after we do a good job like tonight. I’m not saying you have to, but it’s good to see each other somewhere other than practice, you know? I think you’ll be surprised.”  
  
Neil hesitated. He had intended to practice anyway, and then let Andrew drive him through the city peeping at apartments better than his own, something Andrew had taken to doing lately in order to berate him.  
  
“It’ll add to our synchronicity on the track,” Matt said. From the grin they gave Neil’s squint-eyed look, they knew how low of a blow that was. “If you don’t like it, you can go home. But we’ll miss you, man.”

  
  
So the next night instead of riding with Andrew or watching Exy matches on his wallscreen Neil stepped outside his building and into Matt’s hovercar, dressed in the jumpsuit Allison had pressed on him after the game. It was new, shot-through with shimmering thread, and tight as his Exy uniform was.  
  
“I’ll get makeup on you next time,” said Allison from the depths of the back seat when she saw him. “At least you wore it. I don’t have to dress you by force.”  
  
“She would have, too,” said Dan. “It happened to me. Hello, Neil. I’m glad you didn’t change your mind.”  
  
Neil wasn’t sure that he hadn’t. He got into the car.  
  
They crept through traffic until Matt shouted in recognition and pulled off the main road. They parked the car on the thirtieth level of a parking structure whose nu-steel strats had seen better days, and they all crammed into a lifter to go down to sidewalk level. The bright holographic screen above the curving line to get in the door read _, The Farms_ _At Twilight_.  
  
“You’ll understand when we get inside,” Matt said.  
  
The gaggle of them bypassed the line—gathering a number of displeased glares—and stepped past three sets of doors. The pneumatics were broken on the third one, and Matt held it open to usher them all through. The moment Neil set foot inside his eyes widened.  
  
_Plants._ Plants were everywhere. Hanging from the ceiling. Twining up the legs of the chairs, the tables, the front of the heavy bar set against one wall. Jutting up at random places from the floor. Neil lifted his hand to rub the leaves of a trailing vine and gasped when his fingernails bruised it. “They’re real!”  
  
“Of course. Nothing but authenticity,” said a familiar voice. Neil looked up and saw that the Foxes had followed the crush of people breaking up against the bar; and there was Nicky behind it, grinning and passing a tall cylindrical glass to a person wearing a top spangled with glowing fringe.  
  
“The usual, Nicky, and something for Neil,” said Kevin.  
  
“Order! The Foxes—regular. And a Raspberry, non-alcoholic, unsweet,” Nicky shouted over his shoulder. A boxy waiterbot chirped and started pulling bottles down from the shelf. The cups of its joints were lit up yellow.  
  
“Solar?” Neil asked, surprised.  
  
“Paint,” said Erik, appearing before Nicky and wrapping an arm around his waist. “But it gives the right sense. Hello everyone. Welcome, Neil!”  
  
The lens clicked into focus in Neil’s mind. “You two own this place. How much money do you have?”  
  
“A lot,” said Erik.  
  
“Why do you work cut-rate pit crew?”  
  
“Because Coach won’t let us work for free,” said Nicky. He took the tray of drinks from the bot’s waiting arms and slid it onto the bar counter. “There you go, you healthy athlete people. One day I’ll get you to try the real booze.” He winked at Matt. Matt grinned. Dan frowned and hooked her arm through Matt’s cocked elbow, which caused Matt to spill the bright yellow drink they’d just picked up.  
  
“We’ll find a table,” said Allison close to Neil’s ear.  
  
Raspberry was deep magenta and pleasantly tart, though full of tiny grains that got stuck in Neil’s teeth. “Seeds,” Kevin explained. “I keep trying to get them to leave them out.”  
  
“I don’t mind,” said Neil. He crunched some of the seeds between his teeth and took another sip.  
  
The music changed to a rollicking, twangy rhythm. Renee clapped her hands in delight. “Square dance,” she said, to Neil’s confused glance. “You can join in if you want to, the announcer tells you what to do.”  
  
“They used to do them at farms,” said Dan before Neil could ask. “Kevin knows more about it, Kev?”  
  
Kevin flushed, pleased, and straightened up in hir chair. “It’s a group dance. You get into couples and form squares, four couples a square. It was pretty widespread, actually, because even though it’s a folk dance they used to have flatscreen movies about where it came from—what they used to call the Old West, in this country—and people associated it with the romanticized rugged spirit of—”  
  
Neil stopped listening. The writhing mess of bodies on the dance floor had squared off as Kevin had said, pairs and octets. Renee stood and offered her hand to Allison, who took it, and let herself be dragged into the nearest square. Erik and Nicky waved from across the room. Erik had the blank look of a person reading from an eyescreen and Nicky was adjusting an earpiece.  
  
Dan stretched her arms over her head. Neil could see her joints pop. “Well, Matt?”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“Let’s go,” she said, and swung Matt into the crowd. Even Aaron had found a partner, Neil saw, someone tall with a ponytail of dark hair.  
  
“You’re not dancing?” he asked Kevin.  
  
Kevin shook hir head and patted hir left leg. “Don’t want to risk it, today.”  
  
Neil stared. “It still hurts?”  
  
Kevin looked at Neil strangely. “All the time. I thought you knew.”

It was weird, to consider Kevin _not_ complaining about something. Neil drank more Raspberry to keep from having to answer.  
  
The couples on the dance floor were twisting and turning in a variety of confusing ways. It was clear that only a few of them knew what they were doing, but they all looked like to be having great fun, even when they stomped on each other’s feet. Neil watched Matt lift Dan high into the air, both of them laughing.  
  
It reminded Neil of something Jean had said, once. _Life is moving. The healthiest thing for your heart is to move with it._ He said the thought aloud.  
  
“I didn’t know you read,” said Kevin.  
  
“I don’t,” said Neil.  
  
Renee reappeared soon after, flushed and picking her sweaty hair out of her face. “Allison’s getting more drinks,” she said, and Neil saw that Allison was leaning against the bar, managing to make her own dishevelment look intentional. “Are you enjoying yourself, Neil?”  
  
“Yes,” Neil lied.  
  
Renee looked at him.  
  
“No,” Neil lied.  
  
“You don’t know?” Renee prompted gently. She sat beside Kevin and stole the rest of hir bright green drink. Kevin put up a token protest but subsided when Renee flicked hir playfully on the cheek. “It’s a lot, isn’t it. I didn’t think I’d find a place like this in the city.”  
  
“You grew up in cities,” Neil said, slowly.

Renee nodded. “Yes. My life was worse than what’s in my file, even. I’m sure you know the experience. Perhaps someday I’ll tell you more of it. But when I went out to the farms---to Stephanie, it was a rebirth.” She brushed her fingers over her left wrist and extended it forward over the table for Neil to see. A glowing cross appeared over her pulse, beating in time with it for a few moments and then fading. “There is a lot more to all of us than you’ve seen, Neil.”  
  
Neil tried not to flush. He felt that he should apologize, but he didn’t know if that was real, or just Renee’s effect. “You could’ve said you’re a—what?”  
  
“Christian,” said Renee. “Lutheran, if you want to get particular. Neil, the first time I felt at home was enclosed by His grace. You don’t have to find a religion, but you’re allowed to find a home.”  
  
The Raspberry was cloying in Neil’s throat. He shoved his chair back and stood. “I have to go.”  
  
“Don’t run off,” Kevin warned at Neil’s retreating back. Neil waved a vague hand to show he’d heard without having to make any promises, and tried to find a shadow big enough to lose himself in but small enough that nobody else would try to share it. It was more difficult than he was expecting. He was out of practice.  
  
At last he found a spot off the corner of the hall to the bathrooms. He found he’d taken his handheld out of his pocket, but had no idea who to message with it, so he returned it and jiggled his leg until the tight fit of the jumpsuit shifted enough so the handheld didn’t dig into his hipbone.  
  
He leaned against the wall and watched his teammates spin into the pattern of dancers, a repeating irregular spiral where they disappeared and reappeared in flashes at the center, the mid-point, the fringes. They were a fractal Neil couldn’t get the shape of, and he realized, as the sharp metal edge of the corner bit into his shoulder blades, that he was ashamed. He’d forgotten his teammates were people.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Neil said, when Matt swung by him, giddy with exertion and glowing from the sun-gold-painted lights shifting cutouts over their skin.  
  
“What?”  
  
Neil shook his head. He smiled at Matt and held out a hand, and let Matt slap a wide, sweaty palm over it and squeeze.

  
  
Neil thought about it, as he slept and showered and forced himself to eat solid food (the packet of meal capsules wilted in his cupboard). He thought about it on his way to the track, watching a small child delight the color-change of an ordinary stop sign, an elderly woman bend a listening ear to the person hawking knockoffs on the street. He thought about it as he practiced his Corker, the flip he still couldn’t get right, and his distraction made him do so poorly Kevin went hoarse, shouting at him. The shouting made Neil focus, and afterwards he thought about that, too.  
  
He was quiet on the way to Eden. Andrew noticed. He stopped the hoverbike as soon as they had passed into the air filtration field and got off.

“You don’t want to go today,” he said.  
  
“I want to go today,” Neil said. The words rose up his throat in lump that broke against the backs of his teeth, spilling forth. “Before Eden I thought that everything was either Exy or nothing. Plasma guns and harsh words and tricking the medibot into giving you double vitamins in case you couldn’t get any for a while. But then in Eden I saw people cared, and now I can’t stop seeing it everywhere.”  
  
“ _I_ don’t care,” said Andrew.  
  
“But you try,” said Neil. He swung himself to the road, too agitated to sit still.  “Besides, it doesn’t matter. I can care enough for both us. You showed me how. Andrew, thank y—”  
  
Andrew kissed him.  
  
It should have been like the other kisses Neil had had, fumbling surprises he’d tried and failed to hide from his mother’s wrath. The strange softness, the uncomfortable prickle of being too close to another person’s face. It should have been, but it wasn’t. Andrew’s hand tightened around the back of Neil’s neck and Neil was falling forward with both feet on the ground. There was no road, no undergrowth, no humming bike beside them. There was only Andrew, the smoke and static smell of him. The plush pressure of his mouth, firm enough it was almost painful, but not quite, and oh, that made all the difference. Neil made an unthinking sound, and it reverberated against Andrew’s lips back to his own. He couldn’t breathe. He never wanted to again, because that would mean Andrew had stopped kissing him.  
  
That night Andrew pushed Neil against the wall in the triangle bedroom with a hand on Neil’s chest and his mouth against Neil’s.  The velvet edges of the shadows were nothing to the soft, deep strokes of Andrew’s tongue. Andrew braced his other arm up by Neil’s head, elbow to fist against the plaster, and Neil thought he understood what Renee meant when she spoke of being enclosed by grace.

* * *

 


	5. III-1

_**III.** _

Spend all you have for loveliness,

     Buy it and never count the cost;

For one white singing hour of peace

     Count many a year of strife well lost,

And for a breath of ecstasy

Give all you have been, or could be.

* * *

 

Most stadiums were an excuse for an Exy track. This Exy track was an excuse for a stadium.  
  
No matter how long, Neil didn’t think he’d ever get used to having the public’s eyes on him. The crowd around the perimeter was meters thick, even this many hours before the meet. Neil ducked into Matt’s side to let them shield him from the suffocating bodies. When Matt realized what Neil was doing they shuffled in front of him, angling their gym bag to increase the span of their wall.  
  
“They’ll be looking mainly at Kevin and Renee anyway,” Matt said. With the level of noise coming from the crowd, a regular voice was the equivalent of a murmur. “Big stadium though, yeah?”  
  
Neil let out a shaky breath. “Yeah. Hope the track is worth it.”  
  
Matt grinned then, a white flash across their face. They had a tiny orange fox print painted onto their cheek, courtesy of Nicky’s makeup brush. “I keep forgetting you were out last time we were here. It is worth it. Believe me.”  
  
Evermore was a monolith in aluminum feathers, painted black and wrapped in a vortex around the sheer walls and extending a stories-high triumphant battle cry of a wingtip above the oval roof. Dan snorted as the Foxes waited to be escorted to the away team entrance.  
  
“Kevin says it looks like an old-fashioned lady’s hat,” Dan muttered to Neil. Matt laughed. They were in even better spirits than normal. Neil had noticed that their arm had barely strayed from Dan’s waist since they’d gotten off the hovercraft transport.  
  
“This way, Foxes,” said a haggard-looking person with a braid so tightly pulled it looked like It was stretching the skin of their face. They were wearing a jumpsuit labeled “SECURITY” and tailed by five others in similar garb. These handed out earplugs (Aaron shook his head and turned off his hearing chips) as they shepherded Neil and the others to a beribboned walkway that glowed red where the roiling crowd surged against it. Neil was glad for the plugs. The vitrol being spouted by the rabid fans wasn’t particularly inventive, but it was annoying.  
  
They traveled through an ornate and imposing tunnel—Nicky was probably mumbling about ghosts, though no one could hear him—and up a gentle incline that must have been hell on Kevin’s leg and Aaron’s knee. Neil glanced over to them; Aaron was scowling, but aside from that neither of them betrayed any discomfort. The floor felt disturbingly unyielding under Neil’s feet. He stomped and peered at it closely. It had a wispy, twisting grey pattern through the black...stone?  
  
“Mah-bool” Matt mouthed at Neil, whatever that meant. Neil could ask them to repeat it once he could hear again.  
  
They emerged into a locker room four times the size of their own, depressingly monochrome after the bright orange Neil had become accustomed to. He plucked out his earplugs once the security personnel left and found a locker cubby to throw his bag in.  
  
“I hate your old digs, Day,” said Dan, commandeering another cubby. Kevin laughed hollowly.  
  
“The home locker room is bigger,” sie said.  
  
“All right,” Wymack said, clapping his hands before the sour atmosphere could spread. “Now what I _don’t_ want it you all freaking out, out there. The box may be big but the track is the same, and you know what the fuck I’m asking you for. And what’s that?”  
  
“Our best,” said Renee.  
  
“Exactly. And you’ve given it to me in practice, hell, you’ve even given it to me once or twice during meets. So do that again and we won’t have a problem.” He patted Kevin’s shoulder and Neil saw some of the tension leave hir. “I’ll send through the strategy rundown while you change. If you don’t think you need to read it, then too bad, I know you do.” He left so they could change.  
  
There weren’t shower stalls. Neil wasn’t sure if that was intentional, to unsettle the opponent, or it was the looming presence of Evermore around him that was making him paranoid. He darted to the toilets and closed the door, propping his handheld on the automatic lock so he could see Wymack’s notes.  
  
The Ravens had fallen from mythical grace with the loss of the championship the year previous; but they were still formidable opponents, evinced by them scraping a win off the Trojans to maintain their habitual seat in the finals. If it had been last year, Neil would have expected a rout. But the Foxes had against all odds clinched the final from the Raven’s wing-tips twelve months ago, and that was before the loss of their captain and, from what Neil had heard, taskmaster. This was possible. The Foxes could do this.  
  
And this time Neil was one of them.  
  
Kevin was tightening hir gloves when Neil re-emerged in uniform. “Remember Martin has a weak spot on their left side,” sie said to him. “Try to get passes on the left.”  
  
“We can do this, Kevin,” said Renee gently. Kevin opened hir mouth, closed it, and swallowed, looking pale.  
  
“Ride hard,” said Dan, winking at them all, and then Wymack was back to corral them to the track for warm-ups.

 

The track was _spectacular._  
  
Neil only realized he was breathing loudly, mouth agape, when Allison teased him about catching spybots. He wet his dry lips, but he couldn’t manage to stop gawking. He knew the track had the same specs as the Foxhole, but it looked so much bigger, lit up from hovering floodlights and ringed by red and white sprays of fiber-optics. The track itself was red instead of the standard electro-radioactive blue, and the ramps and ridges that rose from it—prompting thunderous cheers from the spectators—were black, giving the vertiginous feeling that they should be indentations. Everything had a shimmer over it—a sparkle, like the stars Neil had seen in Eden but with more glamor, and all that artificial brilliance. Neil felt his heart kick in his chest.  
  
“Right?” Matt said, beside him. They were the only Fox that seemed excited instead of apprehensive or downright terrified. Neil was suddenly, violently, grateful for their presence. “Stuff like this makes me want to be an Exy racer when I grow up. And that’s what I am!” They grinned. Neil managed a weak grimace in response.  
  
A black metallic cylinder rose from the center of the track. The noise of the crowd became incomprehensible screeching, and Neil wished for the earplugs again. As he watched the cylinder split into feather-shaped pieces, rippling into realistic detail, and sank back down, revealing the team of twenty Ravens in their well-known V-formation and their black-suited coach. The faces reflected on the screens were identical shades of ferocity. A Raven near the front of the V bared their teeth.  
  
“One has to respect their flair for the dramatic,” Allison murmured.  
  
“Needs more glitter,” said Nicky. He and Allison exchanged tight-lipped smiles.  
  
The opening ceremonies were as mind-numbing as usual, only an obstacle between Neil and the track. He couldn’t even turn off the inner-track audio, because the team was standing so close to each other that he could hear it from every eyescreen _and_ the two other handhelds. Neil had adjusted his kneepads fifteen times before Aaron snapped at him to quit moving and Neil snapped at Aaron to mind his own business. Neil suddenly wanted Andrew, his steadying presence, the hand on the back of his neck. It was an unsettling feeling.  
  
“David!”  
  
A stage whisper sounded over to the side. Neil looked over and saw Abby, of all people, hanging over the railing and surrounded by an exasperated security officer and several beeping securitybots. Abby seemed unperturbed.  
  
“Abbs?” said Wymack, his face creasing in surprise. He scowled at Allison and Nicky’s sniggers and guided his chair up beside her. She hugged him immediately. “What are you doing here?”  
  
“We came to see you and your team, of course. Hi, Neil!” said Abby, as if she were a regular attendee at Exy matches in the city—in any city. Bee appeared behind her, puffing from the walk, and there were Jean and Jeremy, Jean’s tiny smile just as warm as Jeremy’s blazing grin, and Thea Muldani in all her tall elegance and—and Andrew.  
  
Neil brought shaking fingers to his mouth.  
  
“Woah,” said Matt, amazed.  
  
“Thea! Jean, Jeremy?” Kevin was a frenzy of astonished joy, hir nerves overwhelmed for the moment as sie reached for three sets of hands at once. Thea kissed the back of hir knuckles. Kevin turned red. Dan cackled, delighted, and Kevin looked as if sie wanted to sink into the floor.  
  
Bee had reached the railing and leaned to hug Wymack as well, while Wymack turned as red as Kevin. The resemblance between them had never been so strong. Nicky was howling his laughter into Erik’s neck.  
  
Neil still hadn’t moved.  
  
“I’m going to say hello to Andrew,” said Renee softly, looking at him. Neil nodded, dumbstruck, and then waited in confusion as she stood there.  
  
“Would you like to come with me?” Renee prompted after a painful wait. Neil jerked and tucked his hands in the pockets of his jumpsuit. He trailed behind Renee, feeling shy, as she went to the side of the indented dugout pit to greet Andrew.  
  
“I really must insist you leave,” the nearest securitybot was saying, smooth digitized voice at odds with the exasperated tapping of the security person’s foot. “Spectators are not allowed this side of the friction wall.”  
  
“Give us a minute, you tin can,” said Abby, rolling her eyes. The securitybot repeated the order until the personnel leaned forward and touched a panel on its side. Then it lit up and started vibrating.  
  
“It’s calling my manager,” said the security person in a bored voice. “We’ll revoke your seats and your tickets if you don’t get a move on.”  
  
“Sorry,” said Jeremy, turning big eyes on them. “We’ll be going. We just wanted to say hi, you know.”  
  
The security person huffed and crossed their arms.  
  
Renee finished her whispered conversation with Andrew and smiled at Neil, ushering him closer. On numb legs Neil tripped forward and craned his neck to look up at Andrew.  
  
“You didn’t have to come,” he said.  
  
Andrew shrugged. “Bee made a fuss.” He tapped two fingers against his left temple, over his green eye, and ignored the increasingly agitated security bots—three of them were blinking and shaking now, and—and yes, now there was a fourth. Bee waved at Andrew and started ushering the rest of them down what looked to be the service ramp they’d come out of.  
  
“Have you ever seen Neil race?” Renee asked. Andrew shrugged again, and Renee smiled. “He’s very good. I hope you’ll enjoy it.”  
  
“Mm,” said Andrew. He pointed his chin at Wymack. “Back unto your place, old man.”  
  
“Up yours, Minyard,” Wymack retorted easily. He released Abby’s hand with evident reluctance, eyes lingering after her as she followed Andrew out of sight.

Neil pressed the back of his hand to his neck. He felt very warm.  
  
“Thanks,” he mumbled to Renee. “You didn’t have to say that.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“That I’m good.”  
  
“You are,” said Renee, kind and firm. The corners of her eyes crinkled. “And tonight you get to prove it in front of the whole country.”  
  
For once, instead of pressure at the concept, Neil felt excitement. “Yeah,” he said. He felt his mouth break into a smile.

The Foxes rode onto the track to applause nearly as loud as for the Ravens, which muffled as soon as Neil passed through the wall. Dan tucked one leg up and rode to the midpoint on the other alone, grinning widely. The televised announcers clapped their hands to their faces in amazement at her cheeky showmanship. Neil resisted rolling his eyes.  
  
The rotating projection of a coin shot up from centerfield as one of the referees gave Dan the choice to call it. According to Kevin, a “coin” had once been a real thing, a unit of money, but Neil was skeptical. It seemed inconvenient to use something so easily lost.  
  
The Ravens won the flip. Kevin swore and Allison crossed her arms; the Ravens, as one, stomped their right feet twice. They scattered to their pit and their starting positions, and the Foxes scrambled to do the same. As winners the Ravens would start a half-track ahead of the Foxes for the first half. It would be flipped for the second, but studies reported a positive psychological impact of winning the first extra ground. Dan, Renee, and Kevin rocketed to the staggered starting line. Renee cranked her foot pedals to let the static interference scream. Kevin’s face was focused, filtering out the screens and the crowd and narrowing to the track in front of hir. Dan was still grinning.  
  
A moment before the starting buzzer rang, she punched the air with the fist holding the baton and yelled.  
  
“ _Foxes!”_  
  
“ _GO!”_ the buzzer and the spectators shouted as one.  
  
The Ravens came down hard and fast, a horde in three people.  A ramp shot up before the cyclist, who used it as leverage to shoot over Dan’s head, landing barely a meter in front of her and making her swear and twist sideways to avoid a collision. Matt pounded on the plasma-glass in protest.  
  
It became quickly apparent that the Ravens had not forgiven Kevin Day for abandoning them, or the part sie had paid in their leader’s downfall. The boardist collected a full fifteen-second foul by dropping down on top of Kevin and sending them both crashing into the track, friction armor blaring. The first bladist rode Kevin’s ass the entire way around the track, limiting hir ability to land tricks, and the second went so far as to grab the tail of Kevin’s board when Kevin attempted a flip, which got the bladist banned from the meet. He didn’t seem to care: he spat at Kevin’s feet as the referees escorted him to the Raven pitside. Wymack’s knuckles grew tighter and tighter around the arms of his chair until he finally called for Kevin to sub out.  
  
“I can handle it,” Kevin said, jaw clenched, as sie passed Neil on the ramp. “You can’t take—”  
  
“I can and I will, and you can shut up about it,” Wymack said, and then the plasma-glass slid around Neil and Wymack was cut off.

Renee handed Neil the baton as soon as he was on the track proper, tilting up on her back wheel and sliding in front of the Raven boardist attempting to crowd Neil against the wall. Neil waved at her in thanks and pointed his board’s nose down to duck under the overhang that shot up in front of him, red morphing into black. The black panels were reflective. It was unsettling.  
  
Allison came on for Dan, penciled brows a stormcloud. The first foul on the Foxes’ side went to her when she elbowed the Ravens cyclist in the gut when they attempted to pass her. It was shaping up to be an ugly game even for Ravens standards.  
  
Neil was upside-down when it happened, focusing on the last rotation of a 720. At first he assumed it was dizziness mixing up his vision, but then he saw the baton rolling across the surface of the track and the Ravens cyclist looming wheels raised over Aaron’s sideways bike. Neil flattened himself to his board to speed up and hooked the Raven around the waist, pulling them from the seat as they swore, vaguely registering Allison hitting the track beside a blond-headed sprawl and the ringing of the buzzers.  
  
Neil and the cyclist were pulled apart by referees, sweaty and furious. The cyclist had blood in their teeth. Neil wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his uniform, shaking with rage and adrenaline. The track pulsed and all the topography sank back down into flat red as Wymack rocketed up onto it, referees keeping the rest of the players from moving. Two medibots were hot on Wymack’s hoverwheels.  
  
“It’s not a big deal, fuck off,” Aaron was saying, fighting with Allison as she attempted to make him lean his weight on her. The moment he put weight on his bad knee his face went ashen and he collapsed. Wymack used an impressive swear word Neil had last heard while stealing meal capsules from a roadside cart in the seedy part of his last city. Despite himself and the situation he was impressed.  
  
Allison and Wymack loaded a protesting Aaron onto the bodyboard the medibots stretched between them, pressing the buttons for restraints when Aaron attempted to sit up. Aaron suggested truly shocking things about their mothers that Wymack ignored and Allison, baring her teeth, agreed with. The screens blared the announcement that the meet would be taking a short break while the Foxes’ cyclist was checked for injury.  
  
“ _Aaron_ ,” Nicky cried as soon as Aaron came down the ramp. He raced forward, clutching Aaron’s arm where it was strapped to the body board and jogging alongside the medibots as they took him to the away-team medical bay. “Are you all right? What happened? I mean we _saw_ what happened but we weren’t there so we must have missed something--”  
  
“You’re making it worse, Nicky,” Aaron snapped. Nicky’s face fell from worry into blankness and he froze in the middle of the hallway, curling in around himself. Erik came up behind him and drew him into his arms. They were joined by Renee, who rested a hand on Nicky’s shoulder and spoke quietly to Erik. Feeling intrusive, Neil slipped into the medical bay behind the ‘bots and tucked himself into a corner.  
  
The doors burst open. Wymack came in, hair sticking up from running his hands through it. “They’ve called an early halftime,” he said, going over to Aaron. “Three minutes forty-one seconds extra in the next half, which is damned annoying but at least gives us a chance now to check you up. What’s the status?”  
  
“Stunning,” Aaron said, trying again to sit up. The medibot nearest made a warning noise and extended an arm to shove him back to the medical table he was laid out on. Aaron glared at it.  
  
“Minyard.”  
  
“I swear,” Aaron said. “Just get this thing to strap a couple stabilizers on my knee and I can make it through the rest of the meet.”  
  
Wymack leveled Aaron an unimpressed stare. “Are you sure?”  
  
“Positive.”  
  
For the second time the door slammed open with a speed that Neil thought should grate the slide mechanism. He had to hand it to the Ravens for having state-of-the-art engineering and shock absorbers. It was Andrew this time, out of breath and tugging down his arm bands.  
  
“Oh no,” Aaron groaned, pulling the blanket up over his head. Andrew flipped him off and pushed past Wymack to get to his brother’s bedside.  
  
“Want to tell me why Nicky’s blowing up my eyescreen?”  
  
“You saw,” said Aaron, a note of petulance creeping into his anger. “Got knocked off my fucking bike and now everyone’s acting like I’m on my deathbed.”  
  
“I would advise limited motion until your anterior cruciate ligament has been fully repaired and you have been checked for interior damage,” said the medibot. Aaron grunted and gave it a swat across the frontplate.  
  
“You are becoming agitated. For your own safety, a sedative will be administered,” said the medibot. A hydrospray slipped down and clicked into place at the end of one of its spindly arms, and Aaron’s eyes widened in horror. Andrew shot an arm across the bed to seize the bot but he was too late: the hydrospray slammed home into Aaron’s bare arm. Andrew’s fist connected with the medibot, sending it spinning away. It crashed into the wall and started blinking and beeping in distress.  
  
“No, no, no,” Aaron moaned, his eyes wide. He struggled to sit, his movements already becoming sluggish. “They _can’t._ I’m a registered drug addict.”  
  
“They’ll ban you from the season--and possibly from the next-- if they find an addictive substance in your blood,” finished Wymack. He looked at Aaron with frustrated sympathy. “What’s done is done. It’s better for your knee, anyway.”  
  
“No!” Aaron swung himself to the edge of the bed and tried to reach the floor. Andrew’s arm around his shoulders kept him back, and Aaron punched Andrew in the sternum. Andrew didn’t move. The reality of the situation was rising in Neil’s chest: this would cost them the match. Sooner or later Renee would have to stop in the pit for repairs and it would cost them valuable time, time they couldn’t recover without another cyclist to carry the relay. They had lost.  
  
Andrew was fighting to keep Aaron on the bed, his mouth white and grim. Aaron’s struggles were growing weaker; soon he had to lean on Andrew as much as he fought to get away from him, just to stay upright. When Andrew shifted to get a better grip Neil saw that Andrew’s hands were shaking.  
  
“We’ve got next year,” Wymack was saying, fierce and low. “Listen, Minyard.  This is a goddamn blip on the scanner, we’ll come back in a year and kick their asses up to their nostrils, do you hear me?”  
  
The other medibot was attempting to fight past Andrew to get to its patient.  
  
“I can’t be out a whole year,” said Aaron, his breath coming faster. Despite the sedative Neil could see he was working himself up to a panic attack, his words clumsy from a lax mouth but his chest rising and falling in quick, tight motions. “It has to be this year, it has to be like this, like, like, like---”  
  
“Hey,” Wymack said. He maneuvered so he could lay a hand on Aaron’s heaving chest. “You think we’re going to be mad at you? Fuck no, kid. We’re Foxes.”  
  
_“I have to be good enough or everyone goes away_ ,” said Aaron, and burst into tears.  
  
Andrew froze, his arms still around his brother. His eyes went wide and Neil saw him look around and realize Neil was in the room, watching. Neil met Andrew’s gaze and held it, trying to be steady through the roiling mess of disappointment-borrowed panic-confusion in his own mind. Wymack was leaning forward, focused on Aaron, speaking gruffly into the space between them.  
  
“Hey. Hey, breathe in and out, okay? You’ve got it, nice deep breaths. In and out. Yeah. I do this for Kev all the time, don’t worry. Hey. I’m here, yeah? I’m here for you.”  
  
Neil was never sure what to do when people were crying. He tried to make himself one with the wall.  
  
“It is necessary that the patient be given proper care,” said the remaining medibot from behind Andrew, vibrating.  
  
“Ah, fuck off, you’ve done enough,” said Wymack. He leaned around Andrew, careful not to touch, and turned the medibot off. It made a judgmental hum as it powered down. Aaron’s cries slowly subsided, becoming heavy gulps and then ragged wet sniffles. He felt around for the corner of the medical sheet to blow his nose and caught sight of Neil.  
  
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said, blotchy face flushing.  
  
“I didn’t want to be outside with Nicky,” Neil said truthfully. Aaron flinched. Wymack shot Neil an exasperated glance and wrapped an arm around Aaron’s shoulders. Andrew twitched and withdrew. It was such a careful dance he and Neil followed, avoiding the touch of another. Neil had never thought to let it make him sad. He wasn’t, now, but he wondered if he should be.  
  
  
The team did not take the news well.

“This is fucking shit,” Allison said in a falsely bright voice, her hands crushing the straps of her hoverblade boots. The sound of Kevin shouting down the hallway undercut her words. Wymack and Neil had come out of the medbay to see a train of smashed securitybots and the rest of the Foxes bunched by the door in various states of alarm. Kevin had taken one look at hir father’s face and turned on a heel to hide around the corner and, apparently, test the decibel limits of hir vocal cords.  
  
Even Matt had lost their perpetual grin. They slumped on the floor, legs spread, head hanging. “He’s going to be okay though, right? He’s not too bad? But they had to sedate him?”  
  
“Minyard will be fine,” said Wymack, for the umpteenth time. “He doesn’t want to see anyone now.” He hesitated. “Andrew’s with him.”  
  
“That explains the carnage,” Dan said, poking a downed ‘bot with her toe. It sparked and shuddered. Neil looked away. Dan covered her face with her hands. “Fuck. Fuck, I know it’s terrible to think like this, but the meet.”  
  
“Either we make a go of it with just Walker, which is the best chance we could have,” Wymack said, nodding at Renee, “or we forfeit.”  
  
“Neither one is great,” Dan said. “Renee, I love you, but the time lost…”  
  
“It is better than giving up,” said Erik. Nicky was slumped against him, staring at the floor and not contributing to the conversation once he’d heard Aaron would be okay. Erik chafed his husband’s arm and looked around at them all. “Come on. I’ve been with this team for three years, and I’ve never seen you run from a challenge.”

“You’ve seen us take improbable risks, not impossible ones,” Allison corrected. She thumped her head back against the wall. “Fuck. Shit. I really thought we could do this again.”  
  
Renee held up a finger and cocked her head. Neil saw the rest of them realize that the hallway had gone quiet around them, but for the dull hubbub of the track filtering through.  
  
When Kevin came back around the corner sie was wild-haired and with bleeding knuckles, but sie had a blazing look of concentration. Sie strode through the clustered team and stood in front of the medical bay doors, spotting an occasional drop of blood on the floor behind hir. It was lucky the medical bay was so close, Neil thought.  
  
Kevin’s shoulders were back, hir chin high. Sie looked around at them all, even Wymack, with the presence of some long-forgotten monarch.  
  
Sie said, “I have an idea.”

* * *


	6. III-2

_“Welcome back to the Exy National Championships! The Foxes suffered a difficult injury during the first half, but it seems they’re back on the track, and yep, no word yet from the Ravens on how this might impact their chances, but I tell you, Kayden, they can’t be super upset. Of course it’s horrible, aytch-oh-are-horrible, but that’s the sport, folks! Starting the second half will be, for the Ravens—”_  
  
Neil turned away from the captioning scrolling across the screens to stare across the track at the Ravens starters. Their distinctive all-black hovercraft waited ominously at the start line half a track away, and Neil could see how an imaginative person could think they were growing bigger with every rev of the cycle’s radioactive engine, as Matt and Kevin had both agreed they looked like.  One of the Ravens—the cyclist—leaned over and slapped the boardist on the back. Neil realized he was grinding his teeth together and stopped.  
  
“I hate them,” Allison said lowly. Neil jerked his head in assent, and even Renee between them had no censure of the less-than-charitable emotion. Her normal smile had been replaced with a face as smooth as stone.  
  
When the buzzer sounded, Neil didn’t waste any time. He shot after the cyclist—a different one than had run over Aaron, but the Ravens were practically homogenous anyway—and rode her ass ten centimeters away, sparks from her wheels biting at his exposed legs and arms. She swore and he gave her the finger, skidding sideways to grip the rail surging out of the track when she tried to knock him off by banking hard. Neil crossed hand-over-hand upside down, kicking his board into the air to keep it moving, and landed on the bare edge of it when he flipped back upright. His feet skidded on the rubber surface. Neil clenched his belly through the nauseous flip of his gut and fought himself to a balanced stance.  
  
Through the glass he could see Wymack yelling at him. Neil ignored him.  
  
“That’s it!” Allison screamed as she rocketed past, ducking instinctively as Renee slid nearly parallel to the track for a turn, though Allison was too far away to be in danger. Renee accelerated and burst through the Ravens’ first attempt at a handoff, nearly knocking the baton out of the bladist’s hand. The Raven cyclist was meters down the track by the time they recovered. The screens showed the pleased set of Renee’s jaw.  
  
The Ravens responded to the Foxes’ fereocity by pounding down the track. By the time Renee signaled a sub-out the Ravens were ten laps ahead, the boardist inching ahead of a furiously yelling Allison, batons passing within a meter of each other as Allison made a desperate bid to force them off their trajectory. Neil felt the entire stadium holding its breath as Renee aimed for the off-ramp, waiting for the last breath of the Foxes, the overwhelming power of the Ravens taking back the title they had held for so long. The Ravens cyclist even pulled up a bit in front of Neil, slowing down in preparation for the easy win.  
  
Renee passed through the plasma-glass. The screens reflected Tetsuji Moriyama’s small, gloating smile.  
  
Andrew rocketed onto the track.  
  
He was riding Aaron’s bike and dressed in Aaron’s uniform, tinted glasses covering his telltale eyescreen. SMART fabric™ adjusted for the breadth of his shoulders, and Allison had done a passable job of cutting Andrew’s hair in an approximation of Aaron’s style, but still, Neil wondered how the crowd—surging to its feet around them, screaming—and the announcers—clutching each other in shock—could be so easily fooled.  
  
It was a gullibility the Foxes were counting on, as Allison passed Neil the baton and Neil nudged his board into a steep dive.  He had to force himself to keep his eyes on the track and not gawp at Andrew across it. Neil had been right. Andrew was amazing. His style—so different from Aaron’s blunt efficiency, how did nobody see the subterfuge?—was raw power coiled behind sixty kilos of radioactive hoverbike, thundering down the track and then, impossibly, turning within a bare panel’s-width of space to twist delicately through the air. If Neil couldn’t see Andrew’s thighs compressing as he landed, he would have thought the bike was made of paper as it left the track, and turned back to machine once more upon it. He was power and grace in equal measures, not so much riding the bike as a part of it, even on a hovercraft that was not his own. Neil’s lips felt numb with awe. He fumbled the landing of a Lien Air and, ears rushing in embarrassment, wrenched his attention back to his own riding.  
  
Neil didn’t want Wymack to sub him off, but he could feel the back left corner of his board lagging. He shot down the ramp, slapping palms with Matt, and tipped sideways off his board to allow it into Erik’s skillful hands.  
  
“Where’s Nicky?” he asked.  
  
“Aaron,” said Erik. Neil raised his eyebrows. Erik smiled, secretive, and refused to elaborate. Neil hoped Erik was up to being the sole pit crew member for the rest of the meet.  
  
As much as Neil itched to be back on the track with Andrew, it was fascinating to watch him interact with the Foxes from the outside. It was obvious that they were rusty. Neil’s teammates kept reacting to Andrew as if he had Aaron’s style, and there were a few near-collisions that had Kevin shaking hir fists in frustration. Still, Neil could see the bones, the missing rib of where Andrew had once fit in. He took the baton from Matt’s descending hand and hopped up onto a rail to gather points while Matt dodged the Ravens cyclist attempting to intercept. He planted a hand on the hub of his cycle and pushed off to leap over a ledge as Dan passed under it, connecting with his bike on the other side and settling it between his thighs with nonchalance that made him seem bored. He was a bulldozer on the track behind Kevin, forcing attacking Ravens back and back and, if they persisted in trying to attack, mowing them over.  
  
Allison muttered the score under her breath as it climbed on either side, making the usual swoops and leaps but slowly, Neil could hardly believe he trusted it, edging towards equality. When Andrew came off the track Erik gave his bike a slap on the wheel.  
  
“You’re doing it!” he said. Andrew grunted and swung himself off, grimacing as his feet hit the ground. His eyes flicked to Neil’s. He hobbled over and stole the water pouch Neil was drinking to dump over his own head.  
  
“You’re smiling like an idiot,” Andrew growled. He shook the water from his hair, and then his jacket, wiggling all over. Neil let the spray hit him without moving away.  
  
“I’m glad I got to see you on the track,” Neil said.  
  
Andrew squinted at him. He shoved the empty water pouch at Neil’s chest. “I hate you.”  
  
Neil felt his smile grow wider.  
  
At five minutes left on the clock the Foxes were two hundred points and three laps behind. Wymack shot Neil and Andrew a look that could cut steel and ordered them to both to sub on. Renee came off first, sweating so badly she’d overloaded her uniform’s Dri-Tek™ and was damp from collar to waist. Allison and Erik helped her down to the floor.  
  
“They’re good,” she said between gulps of air, letting Allison ease her onto the bench.  
  
Matt clapped her on the back. “We’re better.”  
  
“Damn right,” said Wymack, proud.  
  
Neil slapped palms with Kevin and the track opened up before him.  
  
Time slowed.  
  
Neil knew that they needed to hurry, to make up for the points difference in the bare whisper of time they had left. He knew this as he knew how to clean a plasma-gun wound, how to trip the lock on a hovercar, and as he was, slowly, learning to know his own name: in the back of his head, a constant noise that was a baseline rather than an interruption.  
  
He bent his knees and hooked his board to the side as he jumped. He dodged the side-swipe of the Raven bladist. Half a track away, Dan handed Andrew the baton. He would be the best guard for it, Neil knew, and his tricks the easiest one-handed.  
  
Neil dipped down low enough to scrape a palm against the hoversurface, gripping the side of his board with the other and lifting it above his head. His friction armor protected his hand from losing the skin, but it couldn’t keep it completely free from harm. Neil would have to bully the medibot into giving him some antiseptic spray. He didn’t trust the medibot to treat him itself, not after what it had done to Aaron. That was a later problem; Neil put it from his mind. He was too flushed with adrenaline to register the pain now as anything other than a momentary pressure.  
  
One-fifty-seven points behind the Ravens. Andrew passed Neil the baton, fingers brushing briefly, sending sparks up Neil’s arm so strong he thought for a moment he’d somehow touched the emitter on the bottom of his board instead. The start line flashed underneath him. One-oh-seven points and one lap behind. Three minutes.  
  
The Ravens cyclist ground their front wheel against a ramp, spinning at dizzying speed. Dan pounded her fist against her chest, mouth open to curse the loss of the Foxes’ point progress against them. Neil had to try to catch her eye twice before she locked eyes with him and reached for the baton he was passing her. She tucked in her elbows bent forward to leap, flipping over Neil’s head and landing on one foot with both arms outstretched. Neil grinned at her, sharp, and she grinned back. Wymack’s face flashed past in a blur.  
  
Neil staggered as something hit the side of his board, hard. He looked over to see the Ravens boardist hooking the tip of his board under Neil’s, edging him sideways. Neil threw his weight into his opponent and tried to steer him into the inner wall.  
  
“Fuck you,” the Raven screamed, so close the reverberations made Neil’s ears ring. “You and your team go back to the recycler where you belong!”  
  
Neil tried to unhook their boards, shoving the Raven with his elbows and bouncing his knees to make his board wobble. The Raven matched him, glowing edges of their boards grating. Neil just knew his board was going to be all scratches on the bottom. He bucked wilder.  
  
Andrew had the baton. Forty-seven seconds left. Even if Neil could get to the baton in time the Foxes would lose by a point margin, and Neil’s season in professional Exy would end in failure. His first season. His only, if he failed the Foxes this badly.  
  
Andrew roared closer. He extended his arm. Neil couldn’t see his eyes behind the visor, but he knew they were blazing, knew from the set of Andrew’s shoulders and the white-knuckled grip of his hand. The Raven leaned backwards, using the tip of his board as a rudder to move Neil out of Andrew’s path. Andrew persisted, leaning over again. Twenty seconds. Nineteen. Eighteen….  
  
Neil took a deep breath. He stood up straight. And then, with as much force as he could, he slammed his thighs down, entire board shaking from the force of his heels, and dropped out of the Raven’s boardlock to go backside into a flip. He gripped the side of his board, tumbling heels over head over heels, reaching out a desperate arm and hoping, hoping, hoping. The static of the track sparked against his hair.  
  
Andrew slammed the baton into Neil’s palm. Neil raised his head and tightened his core, dropping almost to his knees as he righted himself. The board was under him. The baton was in his hand. The start line flashed underneath.  
  
It was the flip that had given him so much trouble, for months. It was worth a maximum of one hundred and twenty-five points. With the bonus for finishing the last lap, it could bring the foxes to a clean two hundred. Neil prayed it was enough.  
  
The buzzer rang. Andrew skidded to a stop next to Neil, reaching out an arm to seize the back of his neck. Neil couldn’t unclench his fingers from the baton. Even though the glass muffled them, Neil could hear the crowd screaming.  
  
All the screens blared orange.  
  
“Yes!” Dan screamed, barreling into Neil from behind and breaking him away from Andrew’s grip. Neil dropped to his free hand and his knees so he wouldn’t fall off, but he didn’t even mind when Dan squeezed him around the waist in a fierce, brief hug. They had won. They had _won._  
  
The Foxes spilled out onto the track, whooping and grabbing each other in hugs. Dan was swallowed into the roiling mass with glee. Neil saw Matt holding her in both arms and spinning her around. Wymack hovered at the edge, the wall at his back, his grin fierce. Neil wondered where Aaron was before remembering that, of course, him coming onto the track in celebration would blow the whole thing.  
  
“Good job,” Wymack said, as the team thundered down the ramp into the away team pit, still at the top of their lungs. Andrew clapped a hand briefly to Neil’s arm and swung off Aaron’s bike to stride towards the hallway. Neil went to follow but was stopped by Matt.  
  
“You were _amazing_ ,” they said, eyes wide and bright. “Holy shit, I told you you’d get it!”  
  
“Good tight rotations,” Kevin said approvingly. Sie was grinning even harder than Matt. Neil could see tears streaking from the corners of hir eyes.  
  
“That’s our Neil,” Allison said, and then suddenly everyone was complimenting him, telling him how well he’d done, how he’d saved the meet. Neil tried to protest that it was due to all of them, but they wouldn’t have it. He felt his face flame so hotly he thought his head might float away to pop. His cheeks hurt. Neil put his fingers to them and realized he was smiling.  
  
They traipsed as a unit back to the medical bay, where they found Aaron more in control of himself and sitting up. He was leaning heavily on Nicky’s arm. Nicky, though clearly still worried about Aaron’s state, couldn’t keep a smile from his face. Erik went over to kiss him on the forehead and take the chair by the side of the bed. Aaron flinched but didn’t move away, and he held Nicky tighter.  
  
Andrew was changed back into his civilian clothes, lounging across three chairs by the wreckage of the medibot he’d smashed. Neil wondered how they’d kept security from coming in to clean it up. Andrew threw his arm over his eyes when the team entered and did a show of trying to go to sleep.  
  
“You won,” Aaron deduced, looking around at the elation on everyone’s faces. Matt was bouncing on the balls of their feet. Aaron slumped against his cousin. “Guess you don't fucking need _me_.”  
  
“Don’t be stupid,” said Dan. “You did the first half. You’ve been a part of this team the entire season. This victory is yours as much as it’s any of ours.”  
  
Aaron swallowed. He didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t try to argue.  
  
Neil had been staring at Andrew. A glint from the downed medibot caught his eye. He wandered over and poked through the tangled wires with a forefinger, seeking out the red glow. When he found the source he remained crouched, frowning down at it.  
  
Matt came up beside him. “What is it?”  
  
“This ‘bot was tampered with.”  
  
“What?”  
  
Neil tapped the pea-sized red light. “This means someone other than the manufacturer overrode the coding.”  
  
“What’s going on?” said Aaron.  
  
“How long do medibots usually wait before sedating someone?” Neil asked.  
  
“Hold up,” Matt said. “That can’t be right. There’s no way they’d let someone fuck up the medibots for the national championships. That’s got to be because it’s broken, right?”  
  
“Twenty minutes, and there’s supposed to be three warnings,” Aaron said. He sat up straighter. Nicky moved to support his back.  
  
Neil looked at Kevin. “You said the Ravens would try something.”  
  
Dan swore.  
  
“But we beat them,” said Allison. “This was their big play?”  
  
“If it hadn’t been for Andrew—”  
  
Andrew took his arm away from his eyes. The green one let out an electronic wail. “Stop talking.”  
  
“If you—”  
  
“The police are here,” said Kevin faintly, pointing at the door.

* * *


	7. III-3

Neil was growing tired of being put in handcuffs.  
  
“You should be arresting the Ravens,” he argued, yanking against the back of the chair his arms were locked to. The cuffs sent a warning shock across his wrists. Neil yanked again, making the chair squeak. The officer facing him was unimpressed.  
  
This would likely be more difficult than giving away a few autographs.  
  
“Take me to Andrew.”  
  
The police visor covered the officer’s expression, but Neil had the distinct sense he was being glared at. “This will go better for you if you cooperate.”  
  
“I’m cooperating,” Neil said. He bucked his hips to scoot the chair forward. The scrape against the floor was so high-pitched Neil felt it in his teeth.  
  
“You are not,” said the officer.  
  
Neil decided not to dignify this with an answer.  
  
The room he’d been taken to was not large, so Neil expected it when he was relocated. He considered kicking the officer in the shins. The sight of Tetsuji Moriyama, sitting uncuffed and unruffled behind a wide faux-wood desk, distracted him.  
  
“You bastard,” Neil said. “You drugged our fucking cyclist.”  
  
Tetsuji Moriyama regarded Neil with all the consideration given a mote of dust. “From what I’ve been told, a medibot followed standard procedure to calm an agitated patient.”  
  
“That’s wrong and you know it.”  
  
Tetsuji beckoned with a slender finger, and Neil noticed for the first time the officers lining the room, visors reflecting the fluorescent overhead lights. One stepped forward.  
  
“Are we finished?” Tetsuji said coolly. “You’ve seen the boy rude and uncontrollable. I have better things to do than to sit here and listen to unfounded accusations.”  
  
Neil considered kicking _Tetsuji_ in the shins. “Take me to Andrew.”  
  
“No,” said Tetsuji. He pressed his fingertips against the surface of the table and stood, leaning forward on steepled hands. “Nathaniel Wesninski. Your father is dead, as is my nephew. You are of neither interest nor use to me. The only reason I am sitting for this farce is because it is less tedious than getting rid of your body.”  
  
“As threats go that’s pretty weak.”  
  
The officer holding Neil sent another warning shock through his handcuffs. “Sir,” they said, glancing nervously at the surrounding police force. Corruption was more the law than the letter of it, but Neil supposed that many witnesses were non-ideal, especially when said witnesses were government employees.  
  
The double doors at the far end of the room—not the singular side door Neil had been brought through—opened. Wymack barreled through overmatching the officer in charge of him, and the rest of the Foxes followed at a more measured pace. Aaron had been given a medical hoverchair. Abby and Bee were pushing him, Nicky keeping pace by Aaron’s side.  
  
“Where’s Andrew?” Neil demanded.  
  
“Look up,” said Tetsuji.  
  
Kevin made a wounded noise, hir eyes trained on the ceiling. A moment later Neil saw why. Suspended from the backlit tiles was a large blue bubble, frozen mid-ooze in a droplet that pointed towards the floor and its gathered onlookers. Even with the context Neil took a moment to understand. He’d never seen Andrew from underneath, before.  But even bound, muzzled, and trapped in a stasis bubble, there was no mistaking the man Neil had ridden behind for months.  
  
His hands started to shake. “What do you want?”  
  
Tetsuji spread his hands and addressed the rest of the room. “This team has failed to comply with the regulations set down by the International Exy League, and the laws of general sportsmanship. They have flouted that authority by substituting an unregistered player on the track. On _my_ track.”  
  
Across the room, Renee laid a hand on Kevin’s arm. Erik had his arm around Nicky’s waist, his lips to Nicky’s hair. Aaron was pale not only from pain. Wymack was moving his mouth in a way Neil knew meant he was swearing under his breath, though Neil was too far away to hear it.  
  
“Let him down,” Neil said.  
  
Tetsuji shrugged, uncaring, and flicked his fingers at the officer he had beckoned forward. The chief, Neil saw, from the badge on their vest. The officer unclipped a remote from their belt and pressed a button, and the stasis bubble detached itself from the ceiling and dropped to the floor, spreading out as it cushioned Andrew’s fall. It evaporated a moment later. Andrew struggled to his feet without the use of his hands. The right side of his face was bruising impressively. Neil’s stomach turned sour.  
  
“ _Fuck_ you,” said Wymack, finally pushed too far to remain quiet. He drove his chair forward—an officer moved to stop him, but Tetsuji flicked his fingers again and they subsided—and stopped in front of Andrew. Neil saw him murmur something, and Andrew, after a painful hesitation, nodded. Wymack reached around Andrew’s head to unclip the electronic muzzle and cast it away.  
  
“Where are his armbands?” Wymack demanded.  
  
“He was concealing unlicensed electro-knives in them,” the officer holding Neil replied. “They’ve been confiscated.”  
  
Neil burned with secondhand shame. He wanted to yell at everyone in the room to look away from the bare expanse of Andrew’s forearms. Whatever reason Andrew had for covering them, it was his alone. Wymack swore again and shrugged off his Foxes jacket, draping it over Andrew’s shoulders with clumsy tenderness. With his hands cuffed Andrew had to let the sleeves hang empty. Neil forced himself not to be sick.  
  
“Leave Andrew alone,” said a voice Neil knew to be Aaron’s, but when he looked, Aaron had turned his face away. Tetsuji pursed his lips. It made him look like one of Eden’s toads. Neil entertained himself by imagining him sticking his tongue out to eat bugs. Huge, nasty, crawling ones. The kind that stung. The kind that would leave Tetsuji writhing on the floor as poison ate through his veins.  
  
“Your title will be stripped and returned to the Ravens as it should be,” said Tetsuji. “The criminal will be returned to prison, as _he_ should be, and Kevin will be returned to us, as _sie_ should be.” He allowed himself a satisfied smile. Kevin sank silently to the floor, Renee’s considerable strength inadequate under the weight of hir despair. Dan crouched down beside hir, taking hir hand and glaring at Tetsuji with fury enough to shrivel nations. Tetsuji was unaffected.  
  
“Andrew,” said Abby, helplessness creeping into what she clearly intended to be a calming tone.  
  
The room was too large for Neil to feel the walls closing in, but he was anyway.  
  
_I’m sorry, Mom._  
  
Neil drove the heel of his foot into the instep of the officer’s boot and darted to the center of the room, hooking his thumb against the inner edge of the cuff and swiping the pattern he had learned years ago. _There._ The cuffs went dark, falling apart. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the resulting flurry of authoritative yelling. “If Andrew is in violation of the Exy conduct laws, I’m worse,” he said.

He reached into his chest and he pulled out his heart.  
  
It wasn’t easy, as many years as it had been since the last time. Neil had to struggle off the top of his uniform and then his sports bra, and find the buttons under the skin of his chest to let the left side chink out and open, depositing his heart into his waiting hands.  
  
Red paint couldn’t cover the blue glow of radioactivity, nor could it make machine seem flesh. Neil’s heart pulsed against his fingers, wet from the internal humidity of his body, disgusting in its imitation of life. The tubes connecting it to the hole behind his ribcage glowed blue around the oxygenated blood. The light spilling through his clenched fist revealed the seam where natal capillaries spliced into mechanical joints. The long-broken hinge on his pointer finger jutted sideways.  
  
I need to re-set that, Neil thought, and then remembered it no longer mattered.  
  
“You’re a ‘bot,” said the police chief, shock coloring that automated voice.  
  
“Cyborg, technically. Heart, right hand, both lungs, gastrocnemius, and a couple of toes.” Neil twisted his hand back and forth, tubes wrapping around his wrist. He used the excuse of untangling them to avoid looking at the Foxes’ reactions. At Andrew’s.  
  
Tetsuji’s face had gone purple. “Remove that _thing_ from my stadium. Lock it up or recycle it, I don’t care. Just get it out of here.”  
  
Four officers rushed forward. They grabbed Neil’s arms, two and two, and shoved him to his knees. Neil didn’t resist. _Nathaniel_ _,_ his father’s voice crooned. _Be a good boy and come quietly._  
  
“Now wait just a minute here,” said Wymack, the sudden thickness of his drawl betraying his agitation. “That’s my boardist.”  
  
“Lola Malcom was a surgeon,” Aaron said, with the slow horror of realization.  
  
“This is a cease and desist warning Class XXVII-two-five,” said the officer holding Neil’s left elbow. “You are required to cooperate and to answer all questions asked to you. I repeat—”  
  
Matt’s voice was scared. “Neil, what’s happening? What are you doing?”  
  
“Get it _out_!”  
  
“—cooperate and to answer all questions—”  
  
“Lola may have been a surgeon, but my father was never anything but a Butcher,” Neil said. At last, inevitably, his eyes were pulled to Andrew. He expected shock, hatred, utter rejection; but Andrew wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at Renee.  
  
Fighting down the welling of disappointment, Neil followed Andrew’s gaze. Renee had her fist up near her ear. As Neil watched, she moved it in a slow circle. It was a street-gang sign, one of the few shared between territories. _Surveillance. Caution. Say nothing important._

But they were surrounded by police. Obviously they were being watched. Why would Renee signal this now, after Neil had spoken?  
  
Renee repeated the sign. The officers nattered on telling Neil about the rights he no longer had. Neil stared at Renee in incomprehension, tuning out the general excitement. She tilted her chin to the left, and up. Neil mirrored the motion, frowning—and saw the spyfield shimmering in the corner.  
  
Of course Tetsuji wouldn’t take down the opponents to his famous life’s work without an audience.  
  
“Moriyama,” Neil said loudly, “How does it feel knowing your team was beat by a biomech?”  
  
Tetsuji froze.  
  
“You forgot you invited the whole country to watch, didn’t you?” Neil said, staring directly into the spy-field, and the camera behind. “Is that how much it threw you? Your precious Ravens beat by a team that’s not even all human? I’m the newest member of the national Exy champion team. And I’m cybernetic. That’s twice your surveillance and your scanners have fucked up, for Andrew and for me. Well, today. They’ve fucked up for every game that I’ve been in.”  
  
“One illegal biomechanical entity is hardly effective to count for the whole team,” said Tetsuji. He gestured, and an officer snapped a muzzle over Neil’s mouth. Neil grimaced. The muzzle smelled of burning silicon; its sanitization unit needed changing.  
  
Andrew took a step away from Wymack and backhanded the nearest officer across the visor with his bound hands. He got forced to his knees like Neil for his efforts.  
  
Kevin cleared hir throat. “What, exactly, is the law?”  
  
Sie was shaking, and hir face more bloodless than Neil had ever seen it. But sie was standing and meeting Tetsuji’s eyes across the room.  
  
Tetsujij sneered. “None but registered unaugmented biological entities are able to compete in sports, you disobedient child.”

“Yes,” agreed Kevin. “But what does that mean? For example,” sie said, as the officers gawped, “I have a cybernetically reconstructed leg. More than eighty percent of my left leg from the knee down is bio-mechanic. Does that keep me from being an unagumented biological entity?”  
  
The police chief cleared their throat. “That’s different.”  
  
“No, wait,” said Matt. They shoved forward to stand beside Kevin. “My dad’s got a pacemaker. I’ve had a liver transplant,” they said, turning over their forearms to show the faded marks from hydrosprays. “What’s the difference that my organs were _grown_ in a lab and Neil’s were _built_? It’s the same thing for all practical reasons.”

“I’ve got a digitally-designed pussy,” Allison supplied, checking her nails.  
  
“And Aaron’s got hearing chips,” Kevin added, earning Aaron’s scowl. “Is that unaugmented? Non-biological?”  
  
“What does it mean, to be human?” Bee asked, smiling at Tetsuji. Neil ducked his head to hide his reaction to the fury on Tetsuji’s face.  
  
“Arrest them all, then!”  
  
The police chief hesitated.  
  
“Technically,” said Wymack, “the DNA of every single person on that racetrack was entered into the scanner and returned as a registered human athlete.”  
  
Tetsuji twitched towards the hidden camera. Sweat had started to gather at his temples. “That is irrelevant. He’s a ‘bot! And they’re twins!”  
  
“If you’ll recall,” said Wymack, raising  his voice to be heard over Tetsuji’s protests, “I was the one who helped Kayleigh Day write the Exy Safety Regulations procedures, because you deemed it too uninteresting to bother with. And we had the scanner implemented _specifically_ to account for personal bias.”  
  
“This is an extenuating circumstance. Surely you can’t be suggesting—”  
  
Wymack grinned. It was not happy. It was triumphant. “I don’t have to. Chief Browning, I'm sure you can pull up the law on the back of that visor in a quarter-second flat. You know that I’m right. And so, I’ll wager good money, do all the fine people watching.”  
  
Nicky stirred from his place besides Aaron. On whisper-soft feet he crossed the room, under the eyes of the police, the Foxes, and the nation, and ignored the officers restraining Neil to crouch in front of him.  
  
“Close your chest, you’ll get dust in you,” he said, quiet. He took Neil’s heart with gentle fingers and fitted it carefully back in place, fussing with the chest mechanism until it slotted flush against the old scars. When he felt the hum of Neil’s flesh locking back together he met Neil’s eyes. Neil was surprised to see there was no fear there, no disgust, only something Neil thought might be sympathy.  
  
“Release them,” the police chief said reluctantly.  
  
Tetsuji’s scream of frustration was drowned out by Dan’s whoop of joy as she threw herself into Matt’s arms and kissed them on the mouth.

* * *

“So,” said Andrew. “A cyborg.”  
  
They were on Andrew’s bike, hovering high above the feather-spiked roof of Evermore. It had been mayhem, after the Chief had decided to let them go, officers running around in confusion, Tetsuji’s tantrum as he left in disgrace, and the general ruckus of having won the Exy National Title, the team shooting Neil constant glances like they couldn’t wait to get him alone to start asking questions, the Ravens fans screaming for their heads. . . after five hours Andrew had grabbed Neil by the collar, ducked around the people looking for them, and led them out to his bike. Neil wasn’t sure how he got around security and didn’t care enough to ask.  
  
Neil shrugged. He shifted his ass to a different position, legs splayed and hands in front of his body to hold himself up on the front of Andrew’s bike. “I didn’t think it was relevant information.”  
  
Andrew eyed him, unimpressed. His green eye twisted; the police were recalibrating it after Andrew had slipped through as Aaron, DNA _technically_ registered or not. “Not all those scars looked clinical.”  
  
“Not all of them were,” Neil said. He raised a hand to touch the plasma-gun wound on his shoulder through his uniform, lower to drag over the ugliest scar on his abdomen. Andrew nodded, face still, and took a drag from his cigarette. He didn’t ask for more. Neil’s chest fluttered warmth.  
  
“Stop doing that,” Andrew mumbled around his cigarette.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Looking at me like I’m some kind of divine answer. Like those nu-age cults.”  
  
“I don’t know how to,” said Neil. Andrew grunted and scooted down the seat so he was between Neil’s thighs. He touched a hand to Neil’s shoulder and tugged him down so Neil was sitting in his lap.  
  
Neil’s breath caught. “Andrew.”  
  
Andrew touched the cigarette to his lips again and pressed the flat of his other palm against Neil’s cheek. “If you ever need me to stop, anything, you tell me. You say, ‘no.’”  
  
“Like Roland?” Neil asked, turning his face into Andrew’s palm. Andrew snorted and blew smoke into Neil’s face. Neil leant back, sneezing several times, and wiped his streaming eyes when he came back up.  
  
“Okay,” he said. He could feel in his voice that he was still smiling, but he tried to soften it, make sure Andrew knew he was serious. “And you too, right?”  
  
“Mm,” said Andrew. He kissed Neil. It was sweet. Neil sighed and curled his fingers against his own thighs, trusting Andrew to hold him up, Andrew to keep him from falling even though they were hundreds of meters from the ground. Andrew pressed a tiny kiss to the corner of Neil’s mouth before he withdrew completely, and Neil’s eyelids fluttered. Andrew tapped Neil on the thighs and Neil moved away without complaint, resuming his previous perch backwards on the handlebars. Andrew shifted to the back of the seat again. He stuck the butt of his cigarette into the recycling canister at the end of the pack and fished out another.  
  
“Hey,” said Neil. “Give me one, too.”  
  
Andrew narrowed his eyes. “Drug testing.”  
  
“You’re an official part of the team now,” said Neil. “And I’m a cyborg. My lungs don’t get fucked up. If they let me play with a fake heart, then one cigarette is nothing.”  
  
“So I wasted my money getting you a rebreather.”  
  
“You spent money on that? For me?” Neil had assumed it had been stolen.  
  
Instead of answering Andrew passed over a cigarette. He lit his own and then lit Neil’s with the electric lighter. Neil sucked in the smoke and then held the cigarette before him, cupping it in his hands.  
  
“That was supremely uninteresting,” said Andrew.  
  
“It’s not addiction, for me,” Neil said. “I like the smell.”  
  
They would give Neil more leniency than Aaron. Despite the win and Wymack’s arguments, Aaron had been banned from Exy for the next twelve months after his blood test showed addictive compounds. The fact that they’d been forced on him wasn’t enough: the medibot administering the drug had been damaged, and so couldn’t be trusted to return evidence. And after the trouble they’d put the police force through the officers were disinclined to take Neil or Andrew’s word as witnesses.  
  
“I saw Aaron talking to Abby,” Neil offered, when he sensed Andrew’s thoughts heading that direction. “Maybe that’s for the better. He’s got all that medical training, and she needs an assistant.”  
  
“Stop talking,” Andrew said, kicking Neil in the foot. Neil smiled and moved his leg so his foot was within easier reach, goading Andrew to kick it again. Andrew stared at him and didn’t.  
  
“Are you going to stay?” Neil asked. The cigarette was hot against his fingers. Maybe it would melt his rubber gloves. Neil didn’t mind. “With the team, I mean. We could use you.”  
  
“I don’t do things for other people,” said Andrew.  
  
That was false, but Neil had no reason to push it now. He stretched the ache out of one of his shoulders and then continued down to arch his back. He was long overdue for a shower and a change of clothes.  
  
“Whatever you decide, it’s okay,” he said.  
  
Andrew said nothing, and reached again for Neil’s arm.

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand that's a wrap! God, I fucking loved writing this. The next chapter is the "appendices" part of the story, the (once again, BEAUTIFUL) art by still-waiting-for-godot, the poems referenced in the text, and a glossary of some of the terms I thought might be helpful.
> 
> Thank you for reading, and cheers!
> 
> (And yes, I did get the idea for the shapeshifting hovertrack from the arena in that one Bionicle movie. I've been a geek for a long time, folks.)


	8. Art/Poems/Glossary

* * *

_Art Inspiration_

* * *

 

Artist: still-waiting-for-godot

 

* * *

  _Quoted Poetry_

* * *

**Sara Teasdale, “Barter”**

Life has loveliness to sell,  
All beautiful and splendid things,  
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,  
Soaring fire that sways and sings,  
And children's faces looking up  
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,  
Music like a curve of gold,  
Scent of pine trees in the rain,  
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,  
And for your spirit's still delight,  
Holy thoughts that star the night. 

Spend all you have for loveliness,  
Buy it and never count the cost;  
For one white singing hour of peace  
Count many a year of strife well lost,  
And for a breath of ecstasy  
Give all you have been, or could be.

 

**Emily Dickinson, “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose”**

I’ll tell you how the Sun rose –  
A Ribbon at a time –  
The Steeples swam in Amethyst –  
The news, like Squirrels, ran –  
The Hills untied their Bonnets –  
The Bobolinks – begun –  
Then I said softly to myself –  
‘That must have been the Sun!’

But how he set – I know not –  
There seemed a purple stile  
Which little Yellow boys and girls  
Were climbing all the while –  
Till when they reached the other side,  
A Dominie in Gray –  
Put gently up the evening Bars –  
And led the flock away –

 

**Maya Angelou, “Recovery”**

A Last love,  
proper in conclusion,  
should snip the wings  
forbidding further flight.  
But I, now,  
reft of that confusion,  
am lifted up  
and speeding toward the light.

 

**Rupi Kaur**

accept that you deserve more  
than painful love  
life is moving  
the healthiest thing  
for your heart is  
to move with it

**Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, “The Hermit’s Sacrifice”**

From Rome's palaces and villas   
Gaily issued forth a throng;   
From her humbler habitations   
Moved a human tide along.   
  
Haughty dames and blooming maidens,   
Men who knew not mercy's sway,   
Thronged into the Coliseum   
On that Roman holiday.   
  
From the lonely wilds of Asia,   
From her jungles far away,   
From the distant torrid regions,   
Rome had gathered beasts of prey.   
  
Lions restless, roaring, rampant,   
Tigers with their stealthy tread,   
Leopards bright, and fierce, and fiery,   
Met in conflict wild and dread.   
  
Fierce and fearful was the carnage   
Of the maddened beasts of prey,   
As they fought and rent each other   
Urged by men more fierce than they.   
  
Till like muffled thunders breaking   
On a vast and distant shore,   
Fainter grew the yells of tigers,   
And the lions' dreadful roar.   
  
On the crimson-stained arena   
Lay the victims of the fight;   
Eyes which once had glared with anguish,   
Lost in death their baleful light.   
  
Then uprose the gladiators   
Armed for conflict unto death,   
Waiting for the prefect's signal,   
Cold and stern with bated breath.   
  
"Ave Caesar, morituri,   
Te, salutant," rose the cry   
From the lips of men ill-fated,   
Doomed to suffer and to die.   
  
Then began the dreadful contest,   
Lives like chaff were thrown away,   
Rome with all her pride and power   
Butchered for a holiday.   
  
Eagerly the crowd were waiting,   
Loud the clashing sabres rang;   
When between the gladiators   
All unarmed a hermit sprang.   
  
"Cease your bloodshed," cried the hermit,   
"On this carnage place your ban;"   
But with flashing swords they answered,   
"Back unto your place, old man."   
  
From their path the gladiators   
Thrust the strange intruder back,   
Who between their hosts advancing   
Calmly parried their attack.   
  
All undaunted by their weapons,   
Stood the old heroic man;   
While a maddened cry of anger   
Through the vast assembly ran.   
  
"Down with him," cried out the people,   
As with thumbs unbent they glared,   
Till the prefect gave the signal   
That his life should not be spared.   
  
Men grew wild with wrathful passion,   
When his fearless words were said   
Cruelly they fiercely showered   
Stones on his devoted head.   
  
Bruised and bleeding fell the hermit,   
Victor in that hour of strife;   
Gaining in his death a triumph   
That he could not win in life.   
  
Had he uttered on the forum   
Struggling thoughts within him born,   
Men had jeered his words as madness,   
But his deed they could not scorn.   
  
Not in vain had been his courage,   
Nor for naught his daring deed;   
From his grave his mangled body   
Did for wretched captives plead.   
  
From that hour Rome, grown more thoughtful,   
Ceased her sport in human gore;   
And into her Coliseum   
Gladiators came no more.

 

**John Keats, “To Hope”**

WHEN by my solitary hearth I sit,   
When no fair dreams before my - mind’s eye - flit,   
And the bare heath of life presents no bloom;   
Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed,   
And wave thy silver pinions o’er my head.   
  
Whene’er I wander, at the fall of night,   
Where woven boughs shut out the moon’s bright ray,   
Should sad Despondency my musings fright,   
And frown, to drive fair Cheerfulness away,   
Peep with the moon-beams through the leafy roof,   
And keep that fiend Despondence far aloof.   
  
Should Disappointment, parent of Despair,   
Strive for her son to seize my careless heart;   
When, like a cloud, he sits upon the air,   
Preparing on his spell-bound prey to dart:   
Chase him away, sweet Hope, with visage bright,   
And fright him as the morning frightens night!   
  
Whene’er the fate of those I hold most dear   
Tells to my fearful breast a tale of sorrow,   
O bright-eyed Hope, my morbid fancy cheer;   
Let me awhile thy sweetest comforts borrow:   
Thy heaven-born radiance around me shed,   
And wave thy silver pinions o’er my head!   
  
Should e’er unhappy love my bosom pain,   
From cruel parents, or relentless fair;   
O let me think it is not quite in vain   
To sigh out sonnets to the midnight air!   
Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed,   
And wave thy silver pinions o’er my head!   
  
In the long vista of the years to roll,   
Let me not see our country’s honour fade:   
O let me see our land retain her soul,   
Her pride, her freedom; and not freedom’s shade.   
From thy bright eyes unusual brightness shed -   
Beneath thy pinions canopy my head!   
  
Let me not see the patriot’s high bequest,   
Great Liberty! how great in plain attire!   
With the base purple of a court oppress’d,   
Bowing her head, and ready to expire:   
But let me see thee stoop from heaven on wings   
That fill the skies with silver glitterings!   
  
And as, in sparkling majesty, a star   
Gilds the bright summit of some gloomy cloud;   
Brightening the half veil’d face of heaven afar:   
So, when dark thoughts my boding spirit shroud,   
Sweet Hope, celestial influence round me shed,   
Waving thy silver pinions o’er my head. 

* * *

  _Glossary_

* * *

(General)

Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL): one of the four main ligaments in the knee. A completely torn ACL will not heal without help. Circa 2019, the usual surgery for such ACLs is replacement—a procedure taking months to recover from-- because long-lasting viable ACL repair is beyond the scope of medicine. But in the future, anything is possible.

Jistu: Cherokee rabbit trickster figure

Ltd.: abbreviation for “limited.” In a company with limited liability, the managers of the company are responsible for paying back only part of company debts (with unlimited liability, the managers are personally responsible for paying back the entire debt). 

Sie/hir/hirs: a set of personal pronouns; ex. “Sie likes hir hat, the hat which is hirs.” May be pronounced “see,” “hear,” and “hears.”

Tagalog: the national language of the Philippines

 

(Skating/Boarding/Biking)*

720: a flip that rotates 720 degrees (two full rotations).  
  
Backside: Rotating clockwise if in a regular stance (left foot forward on a board) or counterclockwise if in a “goofy” stance (left foot backward), so that the skater’s back faces the obstacle after 90 degrees of rotation.  
  
Cork Flip(/Screw): A flip that rotates not just left or right, but up and down as well.

Lien Air: An aerial performed turning towards the forward direction and grabbing the front or back edge of a board with one hand while tweaking the board back with the knees pointed out. Invented by Neil Blender: “Lien” is “Neil” spelled backwards.

Peg Grind: If a bike has been fitted with pegs on the back axle and front wheel, the rider can use them to grind on a rail or ledge. 

Savannah: Hopping onto an obstacle (ex. a rail) with crossed legs. The leading leg crosses over the back leg, turning the back leg into the new leading leg.

Slalom: Moving in a zigzag course between upright obstacles which are arranged in a straight line.

 

*Due to the creative, often home-grown nature of the sport, the meanings of these terms may vary. Feel free to disregard these definitions and picture the characters instead doing what _you_ know as right.


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